March: laj 1898.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
209 
"That reminds me. 
"The Superlative Man is abroad in the land. Every- 
body has met him, everybody has been bored by him; 
everybody knows him well, and yet few men will rec- 
ognize him by his pi-oper title." 
We looked at one another through the pipe smoke, 
curling blue in the tent, and then looked at the Major, 
to see if we had understood him aright. 
"Maybe you mean the Superfluous Man," remarked 
the Redoubtable Hunter, Avith a sly glance at the Co- 
lossal Liar; "in which case you are mighty near right." 
"Being bred to the correct use of the English language, 
I mean what I say, sir," replied the Major, who both 
in and out of the woods is somewhat of an observer. 
When he gets into a talkative mood, he usually says 
something which, to qitote the Colossal Liar, 'may or 
may not be so,' but which is, nevertheless, worth listen- 
ing to. 
"The distinguishing characteristic of the Superlative 
Man," went on the Major, "is an inability to state an 
vmadorned fact. He is the man who cannot tell of what 
he has seen, heard, or done, unless he dresses the narra- 
tive out in adjectives of the superlative degree. I some- 
times wish that there were no degree of comparisoti, but 
only the positive; because in that case we would all be 
saved a World of ridiculous exaggeration. Limited ex- 
perience is the trouble with him. He forgets tbat other 
men have had experiences; the little that he sees, hcai'S, 
or does, strikes him in every instance as being most 
remarkable. Hence, when telling of it, he makes so 
great a story out of scant material." " 
All eyes turned, as by one accord^ tdward the Invet- 
erate Fisherman, who puffed away oblivious. 
"The Superlative Man is sometimes a fisherman." 
Vigorous nods of approval from all but one of the lis- 
teners. "He is the man who knows the best place to 
catch fish, and who never catches any but the vex-y 
largest ones; who always has a Roland for your Oliver 
bass stoi-y. He is tlie man who is eternally telling about 
the 'biggest trout I ever caught'; and every time he 
tells about it, it is a different fish, in a diiferent place, 
and captured under different circumstances. The news- 
papers call him the fish liar; but he is not a liar. He 
is only unable to see, or hear, or do anything that does 
not seem to him to be superlatively great. 
"The Superlative Man is sometimes a yachtsman" — 
here the 'Story Teller's jaw fell— "but he never goes out 
for a quiet sail, and comes quietly home again. He is 
always dashing along, like an express train, under 
double-reefed mains'l and storm jib, lee rail buried under 
water, s.ir, and waves mountains high; he never saw such 
a black night, and oh-h-h! how it did blow. How he 
will pile up the adjectives to describe a barren little 
cruise in a tub of a boat that could not make three 
miles an hour without starting everything aboard; like 
a general who should let off a park of artillery, and then 
order up the whole: line to dislodge a solitary sharp- 
shooter. 
"The Superlative Man is often fond of hunting" — Old 
Redoubtable began to look wild-eyed — "but he never 
killed a squirrel except from the very topmost branch 
of the tallest tree in the woods. He never blew a 
common chippy into annihilation, as most of us have 
done at some time in our lives; he couid not see one; 
it wo^ild be as big as an eagle to him, and he would 
tell the story so. He never stopped a woodcock that 
was not making some phenomenal gyrations at an in- 
credible distance; he could not shoot a plain, every- 
day partridge, on an easy quartering flight, because he 
never saw such a mark, and he never will. He simply 
could not see it — in that light. It would be '80yds. 
away, sir, a.nd going like a rifle ball,' at the very least." 
The Major paused a moment for breath, when the 
Redoubtable Hunter, who has been to Congress, seeing 
the floor vacant for an instant, struck in: "Speaking of 
partridges reminds me of a time when I was hunting 
in a piece of woods with a couple of friends. As we 
were leaving to go home I bethought me of a small, 
thick clump of second growth, where I could usually 
put up a bird. Calling my dog, I set off for the spot, 
which was near by, and upon entering the brush, sure 
enough, old Jack made the most beautiful stand you ever 
saw.' I cocked the gun, and told him to 'put 'er up.* 
There was a tremendous uproar, and twenty-three par- 
tridges rose and thundered out of there. I let drive at 
the only one I saw, and brought him down, at least 
6oyds. off. He was a ," and Old Redoubtable 
gathered himself for a creditable expression, while the 
Major, seeing his opportunity again, said: "If it was 
the only one you saw, how do you know that there were 
twenty-three birds in that covey?" 
"How do I know? Why, by the noise they mafle as 
they flew out," replied the Redoubtable Hunter, some- 
what nettled. 
"You illustrate my remarks," pursued the Major. 
("The old fool must mean 'interrupt,' " whispered the 
Hunter to the Story Teller; but the Major was under 
full headway, and all listened.) 
"The Superlative Man does not usually like to have 
his yarns _ questioned; he tells the story precisely 
as he saw it; but he sees all things with magnifying vis- 
ion. His whole being is a large exclamation point, 
and_ his conversation bristles with itahcs. Mind you, 
he is not profane; when a man tells a story which 
abounds with big oaths, q_ne is pretty safe in doubting 
the truthfulness thereof. But it is not so with the Su- 
perlative Man; as profanity is only used by liars, and 
men of small vocabularly, he needs none of it. He does 
not want for words, and he is not a liar. He is only just 
superlative;" 
The Major knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and 
rolling himself in his blanket, slept the sleep of the just; 
but we all hated hijn for twenty-four hours. D. F H. 
New York. 
Some Virginia Men and Fish* 
BY FKED MATHER. 
In Forest and Stream of May i, 1897, there is a 
sketch of Delaware Bradbury, a Pamunkey Indian with 
whom I fished, and as the name is variously spelled— 
Bradbury, Bradby and Bradley — ^I expected some of the 
Richmond sportsmen would set the question at rest be- 
fore I embalm Delaware in a second volume of angling 
companions, for the first one has been so well received 
that next fall may see another collection hurled at the 
public, and they most probably will cry "enough." But 
there \vere things in that article calculated to make some 
Virginian rise and tell some yarns about Delaware and 
his brothers, who are kept busy in the open season by 
sportsmen, especially those from Richmond; but there 
Avas not a rise made to this fly. 
A few weeks in the fall of 1875 I was busy, at Blacks- 
burg, where I made the acquaintance of your old angling 
correspondent. Dr. M. G. Ellzey, then a professor in 
the Military and Agricultural Academy there. We talked 
of fishing in New River, and planned a trip which never 
came ofl^. The stream there was not fit for a salmon 
hatchery, and I took one of his students, Mr. W. F. Page, 
and went up into Rockbridge county, by advice of Dr. 
Robertson, of Lynchburg, then a State Fish Commis- 
sioner; and the late Col. iVIarshall McDonald, a professor 
of mathematics, if memory serves, in the fine State Mili- 
tary Institute at Lexington, had most comfortable quar- 
ters assigned us in the State building. Here was the 
necessary fall to the water, and as soon as the hatchery 
was planned and under way I left the carpenters to finish 
the work, with Page to oversee it, and I went off to 
Richmond to fish with Mr, Alexander Mosely, then 
editor of the Richmond Whig. 
At this time politics in Virginia had cooled from a 
white heat through the diff^erent shades known to those 
who temper steel until it might be said to have reached 
the stage of "cherry red," but Avas still red hot. Mosely, 
whose particular brand of politics is forgotten — for he 
only talked of fish to me-^-said: "I can't fish with you 
to-morrow, as I promised, as I have important engage- 
ments to-night and to-morrow; but come with me and 
meet an enthusiastic fisherman with whom you can swap 
lies, and we will fish later. He introduced me to Capt. 
Jack Yeatman, commanding a packet on the James 
River and Kanawha Canal, whom I had met in his native 
town of Lynchburg, but did not know that he was an 
angler. 
Capt. Jack talked of catching "jack," and as this is an 
old English name for pike, Avhen below a certain weight, 
I naturally talked of the pike of New York, which grows 
to a weight of 30lbs. or more, and we got all mixed up. 
"Yes, sir," said I, "in the State of New York we get 
'jack,' as you call them, which occasionally — not always 
— weight 3olbs.; the people there commonly miscall 
them 'pickerel,' but they are the true pike of Europe, 
where a small one is called 'jack.' I have no ambition 
to pose as a champion fish liar, for there are too many 
aspirants for the belt, but in the North we have a brother 
to the pike which we call a mascalunge, with more or 
less variety in spelHng and pronunciation, which has 
been known to reach a weight of 8olbs." 
Capt. Yeatman's eyes ran up and down my sft. 6, 
looked me in the eye and said: "Let's have another 
lemonade." 
Just then Mr. Mosely and friend dropped in, and after 
a general talk on fish, and pike in particular, Mosely 
said: "Our Yankee friend is right, Capt. Jack. This 
little fish in our Virginia waters, which was named for 
you, centuries before you were born, is only one of a 
family which has members that exceed ours in weight as 
much as Barnum's fat woman exceeds the avoirdupois 
of the average Virginia dame. Is that a correct state- 
ment, Yank?" 
"Yes, the statement is correct, but you must take into 
consideration that the species are diiferent. We have 
your species and two larger kinds, as well as the little 
brook pike, which seldom exceeds 8in., and abounds in 
most streams on the Atlantic coast from Cape Cod to 
Florida. The great lake pike and the mascalonge have 
been often taken of 3olbs. weight, but the large ones 
are not as common now as they were fifty years ago. 
Your jack is called pickerel in the North, but there 
they misapply that name to the pike also. But what I 
tell you about the weights of these fish is true." 
"That reminds me," said Capt. Jack, "that last 
year I had a passenger who said that they took a jack 
in a net at Point Pleasant, where the Kanawha comes 
into the Ohio, that weighed i61bs., and I know that 
there are no jack in the Kanawha, for I've fished it from 
Dublin, on New River, to Point Pleasant. I told him 
that there are no jack west of the Alleghanies, for I've 
fished the Big Sandy and all the principal rivers on that 
side; but if he was correct, it must have been one of 
your big Northern fish that had somehow strayed from 
the fold." 
Mr. Mosely asked if this could be possible, and I 
told him that one of the big pikes was occasionally taken 
in waters in the Ohio Valley. At that time I did- not 
know of which species, but have since learned that it 
is an unspotted mascalonge. 
By invitation of Mr. Mosely, Capt. Yeatman would 
fish with us, and early on the second morning we hired 
three darkies with boats to take us down to where 
Butler's Dutch Gap Canal and the James River met. 
"Here," said Mr. Mosely,, "we will try for chub and jack. 
If you catch any you may call them black bass and pick- 
erel, but we'll stick to the pld Virginia names for a 
while, until the spread of angling literature has its ef- 
fect on a younger generation." 
We fished, lunched and fished until it was time for the 
darkies 'to resume the oars and row up stream. "They 
had partly drifted down and had slept, or pretended to 
sleep, all day, and now they were to earn their money. 
They kept the boats alongside so that we could talk on 
the way up the canal, and Capt. Yeatman was disposed 
to get my views on the strategic value of the canal 
which Gen. Butler cut in order to leave Richmond, an 
inland city, a few miles back from the river, but wMch 
is now used by boats to cut off miles of travel to the 
State capital. 
Said I: "Capt. Jack, in cutting this canal Gen. Butler 
did not hurt the Confederacy a little bit, but he saved 
many catfish, then unhatched, many miles of laborious 
swim, and if they had speech they, or their descendants, 
would rise up and call him blessed." 
We had a good catch of black bass, something like a 
dozen pickerel, and some perch and other fishes. Mr. 
Mosely had absorbed enough of modern ichthyoljagy to 
distinguish the two black basses. I say modern ichthy- 
ology because it was shortly after the time when Dr. 
Gill had brought order out of chaos and condensed the 
many nominal species into two; and I can never forgive 
Mr. Mosely for writing to Forest and Stream that the 
big mouth was a "vulgarian." The word was new to 
me and to others, but it "took," and that slanderous re- 
mark rests on a good game fish to-day. Dr. Plenshall 
and I have fought this prejudice, but it seems to be 
fated to remain, and it probably will remain as long 
as one species of black bass appears on the statute books 
of New York as "Oswego laass." At an early day I 
will say more about this abominable misnomer. 
_Mr. Alexander Mosely was a bachelor, and slept above 
his editorial rooms, where I saw his collection of rods 
and pipes, but he had a dinner fit for anglers prepared 
for us at a cafe, and shortly afterward sent me a rare 
collection of pipes from the roots of Virginia laurel, or 
rhododendron, and of "bamboo," which I think is 
known as "cat brier" in New York, and the bundle of 
stems included "seven-barks" and other woods which 
are supposed to impart more or less flavor, or coolness, 
to "the weed of Ole Virginny." 
Because Mr. Mosely died a fcAV years after this fish- 
ing trip, and Capt. Yeatman followed him a dozen years 
later, it is not fair to infer that I am a hoodoo, because 
there are men now living that I fished with, and among 
them is Col. Charles H. Raymond, of New York, with 
whom I fished in A. D. 1840, and he is taking salmon and 
shooting ducks when the time comes to do those things, 
and seems likely to continue these practices indefinitely. 
From Lynchburg up to Lexington was a bit of most 
delightful travel. It was "slack water navigation," which 
meant that the river was dammed and used as a canal. 
We slept peacefully at night, after leaA-ing Lynchburg, 
if the boat did not bump too heavily in the locks, but in 
the morning there was some three hours on deck, after 
breakfast, winding among the mountains, the musical 
horn blowing for the locks and the mist which partly 
concealed and partly revealed the next turn in the river 
and brought startled water fowl suddenly in view. * * * 
But there is a railroad there to-day. Will there be any 
pleasure in travel, for travel's sake, in the next century? 
Dr. Robertson, of Lynchburg, was the head of the 
State Fish Commission then, and I had to run down 
from Lexington to consult with him about the stream 
where the quinnat salmon fry should be planted, for 
this was my order from Prof. Baird. Dr. Rob- 
ertson was a bachelor who had not the slight- 
est element of humor in his make-up. He was 
a most excellent man, but to me he was, as the 
diplomats say, "persona non grata," and my frequent 
visits to Lynchburg ended in Capt. Jack Yeatman's 
office, if he was in town, for there was cheerfulness and 
sunshine. One day the Captain showed me a rod of his 
own make which was at least original. It was a whole 
cane, except the extreme top, and just above the upper 
reel-band he had tunneled into it and then burned out 
the partitions which occur at the joints, and had put a 
ferule on the tip to keep it from splitting. 
"There," said he "is a rod that will have an even strain 
along its whole length, and not on outside rings where 
the line makes the chord of an arc when the rod bends. 
Now, I've tried the line to the stove-leg; take hold of 
the rod, and note the spring of it." 
I tried, walked back and felt the line go through the 
rod, and remarked: "That's an excellent rod for one 
thing." 
"What's that?" 
"For encouraging the trade in fishing lines. Did you 
ever use it?" 
"No, only finished it a few days ago; T don't Icnow 
that I understand you exactly." 
"I thought you hadn't used it. Take hold of : it, and 
put a strain on the rod, and walk backward and. feel the 
line run through." 
He did this, and said: "I thought I had it smooth in- 
side, but it isn't." 
"No, and I doubt if it can be made smooth; see 
here;" and I picked some fine particles that came from 
the rod off the floor and showed him more in the line, 
which was a good cable-laid linen one which was en- 
titled to better treatment. "If the inside of the cane was 
of enamel, like .the outside," I added, "the line would 
run smoothly, but would probably wear more than it 
does in rings or in standing guides, especially if the latter 
were agate lined." 
He thought a moment before he said: "I wonder if 
a little thin varnish poured through wouldn't keep the 
soft fibres close? Probably not. Well, that's not the 
first original idea that flattened out, but I don't know 
but it might be done with some close-grained wood, like 
greenheart or lancewood; I'll think this over." * 
During the building of the hatchery and the troughs 
and trays, I had quite a picnic either with the cadets in 
the Military Institute at Lexington, or swapping yarns 
with Capt. Yeatman. At the Institute there was much 
of interest beside the drills and dress parades. Here 
Stonewall Jackson had been Professor of Physics and 
Artillery Instructor, after his service in tlie Mexican War, 
and Col. Marshall McDonald, Jackson's chief of engi- 
neers, was then an instructor and was afterward United 
States Fish Commissioner. He was my pupil in fish- 
culture. He seemed entirely devoid of humor; but when 
all was ready and the great, handsome eggs of the quin- 
* I don't know whether Capt. Yeatman followed this up or 
not; it was a pet idea with him because it was his own. The 
tubular rod was made in steel some dozen years ago, but was 
abandoned, the friction being too great. 
