210 
FOREST AND STREAM 
[March 12, 1898. 
nat salmon came, a full quarter of an inch in diameter, 
and highly colored, McDonald watched the opening of 
the cases, the thermometer tests, and the final deposit 
in the troughs; then, gathering a handful and putting 
them in a newspaper, he said to me: "Come along." 
He passed "Old Specs" without remark, but we went 
into "Old Gimlet's room," where that individual was in 
conversation with ex-Governor Letcher, the old "war 
Governor." The cadets at Virginia's great military 
academy are not more respectful than boys in the rest 
of the Avorld. and Gen. Smith, the superintendent, wore 
glasses, and hence was "Old Specs." For some reason, 
now forgotten, every surgeon at the post, for years back, 
was "Old Gimlet." I had become well acquainted with 
the Governor, had taken lemonade, mint tea and peach 
and honey at his house, but I had no idea what Mc- 
Donald was up to until he said: "Doctor, try this new 
kind of currant we've been raising. Governor, have 
some/- 
The Doctor and the Governor both took them in 
their hands. They were large, cool, and looked invit- 
ing. As the Doctor put his in his mouth Gov, Letcher 
must have seen something in my eye, for he paused long 
enough to see the effect on the Doctor, and to hear his 
remarks. The Governor passed. 
Those disrespectful cadets! They would come into my 
room, sometimes a dozen, and say: "Old Yank" (I 
was then forty-two), "we have just dropped in to have 
a sociable smoke with you and listen to j^our chirp. Ah, 
thank you; your tobacco is ahvays good." Or a single 
one would drop in and remark: "Gen. Yank, you flatter 
yourself that you can play a fair game of chess, and I 
thought I'd drop in and knock that conceit out of you." 
Sometimes the cadet went off a victor, but it was not 
a grand victory, because the game is the only one I love. 
I am only a duffer at it. But I loved many of those 
boj^s, and thought how eagerly their predecessors of a 
little over a dozen years before had sprung to serve their 
State, and were cut doAvn at New Market, if that is the 
place where some of the finest of Virginia's youth fell. 
The boys all knew that I had fought on the other side; 
I would despise myself to conceal that anywhere, and 
they seemed pleased to learn that I did not object to 
being called "Yank"; and so we got on in good shape, 
and if there was a little fight to be settled with fists under 
■ the hill, "man fashion," I always got notice in time to 
be there. The authorities winked at it, if they heard of it. 
for most men agree that this is the best way for boys to 
settle all grievances. If the trouble was between boys 
where the disparity in size forbade a settlement in this 
way, the smaller could readily find a knight to take his 
place who had the requisite avoirdupois to make the 
contest an equal thing at the start. This is the rule at 
West Point and in the German academies. I believe in 
fighting, and enjoyed the "scraps" under the hill. War 
is the natural state of man, as all history. Biblical and 
other, shows; and a boy who is a coward has no stand-- 
ing among boys, no matter how he may stand in his 
classes. Maltlms said that a war was a necessity every 
thirty years, in order to kill of? the surplus males and 
so keep the world from over-population and pestilence 
and plague. I agree with him. although I have consid- 
ered the opposite tbeory that war carries off the strong 
men, while famine and pestilence take only the weak. 
But the fact remains that immigration from over-popu- 
lated Europe has built cities. States and Territories in 
America, where the wolf should howl and the buffalo 
should range on land that should be left for our chil- 
dren's children for the next ten thousand years! 
This is entirely in line with the policy of Forest 
AND Stream in the preservation of game for men yet 
to be born. We may use Avhat nature offers us, but it 
is ours in trust. We may not destroy in order to increase 
personal gains, but we should ever remember that our 
sons will come after. These are the thoughts which a 
recollection of the cadets' fistic battles under the hill 
have brought up. It is natural to fight. Boys love to 
snowball and to storm a snow fort, and the play of all 
young animals is a mimic combat. When the Peace 
Society succeeds in changing the whole nature of man, 
war will cease, and the great nations will not descend on 
helpless China and divnde her, as they are doing to-day, 
because she has neither an arm}^ nor a navy worth men- 
tioning. . -V -i--^ 
Capt. Yeatman one day said to me: "You seem to pay 
a great deal of attention to the darkies that go along 
the street, and just now you left 3'our chair to watch one 
go by on the other side of the street. What interests 
you -so in them?" 
"I see more quaint character than — no, not than you 
do, but, to put it correctly, I am more impressed with 
it than you are, who have been brought- up among it. 
The darkies of the North have not the careless abandon 
and ragged picturesqueness that they have here, and 
it is a treat to me to see them. Before I came South I 
thought the old-time minstrels exaggerated the negro, 
but that long, lanky man who just passed would have 
been a model for Dave Reed or Nelse Seymour." 
"Who was Dave Reed — an artist?" 
"Yes, artist enough to draw $100 per night from Bry- 
ant's Minstrels, in New York, for a ten-minute act — 
singing; 
"'Sally come up, 
Sally come down, 
Sally eome twist yo' heel aroun'. 
De ole man, he's gone to town; 
O, Sally, come down de middle.' 
Not much, in the way of poetry-, nor music, but there was 
much in Reed's long legs and the way he did that chorus. 
The darky who just passed had Reed's trick of dropping 
his hip that others tried, and as I watched him go up 
the street just now I could imagine that he was doing 
the 'Sally, come up' act." 
"I see; you like that sort of thing; I wondered what 
you copied that darky's motions for." 
"Well, if I did follow them it was involuntary, and 
perhaps I was doing the act mentally. By the way, there 
was a man from somewhere in Virginia who invented 
the banjo, or at least put the thumb-string on it, and 
he came to my native town with a circus and played and 
sang in the ring, and he taught me to play a little, for I 
was wild over it and sought him out. He had a song 
about Lynchburg. The chorus stated that he was 
'gwine down to Lynchburg town, to tote my 'bacca down 
dar.' One verse went: 
"'De ole Jeems Ribber I float down, 
I run my 'bacca boat agroun'; 
De drif log cum wid a rush an' a din 
An' stove bofe ends of my ole boat in, 
But it'll nebcr do to gib it up so,' etc. 
He came to Albany for three years, and I was with him 
every minute that he allowed me. That was about 1846- 
48, wdien I was thirteen to fifteen years old. His name 
was Jo Sweeny." 
"Well, well!" said Capt. Jack, " so you knew 'Old Jo* 
Sweeny! He was a native of Virginia, about Appomat- 
tox, and he and his brother Richard both died in i860. 
There was another brother — and they were all banjoists — 
who was somehow connected with Gen. J. E. B, Stuart; 
but whether as an entertainer or a staff officer I don't 
know." 
This explained why a letter to Jo Sweeny, in care of 
Gen. Jubal A. Early, C. S. A., was not answered; as a 
prisoner taken at Spottsylvania who stopped to listen t6 
the banjo of Color Sergt. George Drysdale, of my regi- 
ment, expressed himself to the effect that if he wanted to 
hear real banjo playing he should hear Sweeny, etc.; 
and by the time Drysdale told it to me there was a change 
in the personnel. Gen. Stuart was killed in 1864, about 
the time I heard that Sweeny was with him, and it is not 
to be wondered at that my letters from Confederate pris- 
ons, some two months later, were not answered: 
"Capt. Jack," said I, "one of the grandest musical 
treats of my life was at a corn-husking near Burkville, 
Va., in the fall of 1865. Most men have a taste for 
music of some kind, and. as a sort of retaliation for your 
observation on my watching Southern darkies I will tell 
you that I have heard you humming, or whistling, 'My 
Old Kentucky Home' and "Way Down on de Swanee 
Ribber,' and therefore know that you are possessed of 
both melody and rhythm, which comprises all there is 
of music to my ear. The harmony of an operatic chorus 
is wasted on me." 
The Captain thought a moment, and replied: "You 
are fond of the songs of birds; they sing without 
rhythm." 
"Perhaps so. but with melody." 
"Ever hear a catfish sing?" 
"I've heard the sounds they make when pulled out of 
the water with a hook in the mouth, if that's what you 
mean." 
"Just so," said the Captain; "we will hear some of 
them sing in about an hour." And we did, as well as 
some horned dace which the Captain called roach. I 
took some of these, and perhaps the fall fish also, at 
Lexington. I refer to the two species of Semotilus, which 
I could not well distinguish in those days. 
My friend Judge A. K. Leake, of Virginia, told me 
this story: "Upon my father's plantation, in the long 
bygone days, was an old superannuated negro whom we 
called 'Uncle Phil Hatcher,' to distinguish him from an- 
other Phil on the place. Old Uncle Phil's working days 
Avere over; he had 'laid down de shubble an' de hoe,' and 
was allowed to pass his declining days in any manner 
that plea.sed him, which was in fishing if the weather was 
right: Init on cold, rainy days when he had 'roomatics 
in his laigs an' de misery pains in his back,' he was to 
be found close by the stove in an outhouse which was 
used as a kitchen for the 'hands,' in which his sister, old 
Aunt Milly, reigned supreme as the cook. 
"He had a genius for fishing that probably was born 
with him, and the scenes of his exploits were a large 
creek and a mill pond, both on the plantation, and at 
the mouth of the creek where it empties into the James 
River, In my early boyhood the holidays were doubly 
welcome if the weather permitted Uncle Phil to fish, and • 
I could accompany him. He was remarkably success- 
ful, and it seemed as if the fish refrained from taking 
others' hooks in order to sample Uncle Phil's bait. It 
made no difference if he baited my hooks; he would 
catch a dozen to my one, and big ones at that. His 
■ tackle consisted of a strong cotton line, spun and twisted 
on the place; an ordinary siz'ed hook, a float made by 
him out of the soft root of the ash, and a cedar rod cut 
and peeled when the sap was running up. 
"The fish he would catch — using our local nomencla- 
ture — were Southern chub (black bass), pike, silver 
perch, carp and flatback. The two last named would 
bite from February to April and from October to Janu- 
ary. I have never seen these fish elsewhere than in the 
waters of the Piedmont section of Virginia, and do not 
know their scientific names. Both have the small, round, 
sucker mouth, and in cold weather are very good eat- 
ing. The carp is a rather flat fish, with large fins, a 
sharp back and large silvery scales. The flatback is a 
round fish with small dark scales on the back and sides. 
You will recognize the other kinds. There were other 
fish in these streams, sun and yellow perch, mullet, white 
chub, catfish, etc; but the fish just named were the only 
ones that Uncle Phil deemed worthy of his steel, and he 
looked with undisguised contempt on the silk lines and 
painted corks which I had. He lived and died in bliss- 
ftil ignorance, no doubt, of such an art as fly-fishing. 
"His invariable bait for carp and flatback was corn- 
meal dough, mixed with cotton, and put on the hook in 
shape of a ball as large as a buckshot, while for the other 
fish he used live minnows. He lived to a great old age. 
delighted in a 'chaw' of tobacco, and there is no record 
of his ever refusing a drink of whisky. If he ever did 
such a thing, it must have been many long years before 
my advent. 
"Apropos of his taste for 'nutritious beverages,' on 
one occasion when we were fishing near an old mill of 
my grandfather's he pointed out the site of an old dis- 
tillerjr where, he said, my grandfather made excellent 
whisky, apple and peach brandj', and he could, in those 
good old days, get a drink as often as he wanted one. 
" 'Dey was de good ole times,' said Uncle Phil; 'dey 
don' nebber come no mo'; it was worf while fo' to lib in 
dem days, 'deed it was, an' yo' gran'fader — well, dey 
don' seem to make men like him now days; an' he 
made good whisky too — not such stuff as dey makes 
now, Hole on, I got a bite — ^nufiin' but a little sun perch, 
an' no 'count. But yo' gran'fader get along fus trate tell 
bimeby ole Gen'l Coke he cum 'long. Ole Gen'l Coke 
he one dem temp'rance men, an' he talk an' talk till yo' 
gran'fader actilly jine de temp'rance. He was a-gitten 
along in years, an' I 'spects his mine was a little 'sturbed, 
an' he nebber do a t'ing like dat. But ole Mahstah he 
jine, an' he nebber had anv mo' health; he jes' pine away 
an' die." 
Judge Leake and I had been fighting our battles over 
again in that fraternal spirit which the true American 
soldier shows when he meets a fair, manly opponent, and 
I remarked: "My dear Colonel" (he has forbidden me 
to address him by the military title which he should be 
entitled to as an ordnance officer in A, P, Hill's Corps, 
Army of Northern Virginia, and so I will say no more 
on that subj.ect) — "my dear Colonel," I replied, ''what 
you say reminds me of two stories, and they run in this 
way, A Northern traveler in Kentucky asked a darkj^: 
'Whose large house is that?' 
" 'Keyurnal Johnson's, sah,' 
" 'Do you happen to know with what corps Col. John- 
son served during the war?' 
"'No, sah; the Keyurnal didn't git into de wah; he 
was too young. He was bawned a Keyurnal, sah!' 
"Judge," said I, "that story represents the Northern 
idea of the Southern gentleman. At thirty he is a cap- 
tain (there is no lower grade); at forty he is a major; 
at fifty a colonel; and then he is a general, ten years 
later — that is, if he is a man of prominence in his com- 
munity. In the North the tendency was to drop them 
after the war, unless a man was a real, sure-enough gen- 
eral; but as the war veterans get older there is a dispo- 
sition to revive military titles. But I'll tell you a story: 
"What your old darky, 'Uncle Phil,' said about your 
grandfather 'j'inin' de temp'rance' recalls a story of a 
New Yorker who visited a Virginia gentleman, and see- 
ing mint growing in profusion, proceeded to make his 
host acquainted with the flavor of a mint julep. Many 
pleasant days passed, and the traveler went his way; but 
a few years^- after he found himself near the old planta- 
tion, and inquired for the proprietor. An old darky came' 
to the door and said: 'De young Maas Brown he dun 
gone off awn a deer hunt, an' de ole maas he gone daid.' 
" 'Dead! Sorry to hear that. What did he die of?' 
" 'He was livin' 'long fus rate till a Yankee cum down 
yeah an' teach him to drink grass in hees rum, an' he 
died; I 'spect dat'll kill anybody, sah." 
Fishing Up and Down the Potomac. 
The Eastern Branch. 
Nothing perhaps so impresses one who wanders up 
and down the Potomac as the abundant evidences of a 
hundred years of nature's forces in the filling in of by- 
gone channels. 
Whether there is really much less water than formerly 
is doubtful. At any rate in the lower river the tides must 
rise to their accustomed level, but everywhere in the 
tidewater creeks, where history and legend tell of former 
channels and commerce, we find to-day mud instead of 
water, and an occasional scow instead of busy ships. 
The f^astern Branch is one of these, and in Revolution- 
ary times Bladensburg was the head of navigation. . Now 
one may hardly reach Bladensburg with a canoe at low 
tide, and a channel is only maintained by dredging as 
far as the Navy Yard. 
The upper end of the branch is principally wild rice, 
cattails and other aquatic plants that cover a swamp 
of considerable extent, and where at high tide in the sea- 
son fine reed bird and sora shooting may be found. 
The lower end is a wide expanse of mud flats, showing 
here and there decayed stumps of piles and wharves and 
wrecks. It is not a thing of beauty at either end, but 
so much depends on the point of view. Many a man has 
come away from it with a string of ducks or fish or rice 
birds or ortolan, as the rail is miscalled here, and thought 
it one of the most pleasant resorts in the country. 
A book might be written of the century of associa- 
tions which cluster around its banks, from the entry of 
the British into Washington, through Bladensburg, the 
old dueling ground when the code was the law among 
gentlemen; past Bennings. the great natural game pre- 
serve and sporting resort in later days; past the ruins of 
the old bridge, over which Booth rode at midnight 
while a nation wept; past the Navy Yard — bu.sy once in 
the building of wooden ships, busier now in the manufac- 
ture of the greatest steel ordnance in the world; past 
Buzzard's Point, with its unsavory recollections, to the 
Arsenal at the point, more a playground for the city 
than a point of defense. But we came to fish. 
The marshy character of the low banks and the ever- 
changing tides make a boat almost a necessity, though 
many fish are sometimes caught from the bridges and 
the rude wharves. 
Three or four boat houses near the Navy Yard bridge 
furnish boats at moderate prices, and the direction we 
are to take depends something on the tides and some- 
thing on what the angler seeks. 
Up the creek on the further side are great beds of the 
wankapins, or little yellow waterlily, and in these, espe- 
cially at low water, it is easy to find great numbers of the 
sunfish, or tobacco box, as this pugnacious little fish is 
locally called, and with a aoz. rod they afford first-rate 
amusement. As a rule eight years is the limit of enjoy- 
ment for this sport, but children of a larger growth 
have found them attractive and were not ashamed to 
acknowledge the weakness. 
"Everybody knows the sunfish, bold in biting and fear- 
lessly fighting to the last on the hook. On fine tackle 
they give quite good sport; and I have frequently quit 
fishing for large-mouthed bass and pickerel in some warm 
water lake in summer because I preferred taking the bold 
biting and voracious sunfish." Thus wrote J. Harring- 
ton Keene; but then he was writing for boys, and was 
rightfully encouraging their probable sport. It is per- 
fectly fair to guess that when he left off fishing for bass 
and pickerel they were not rising well, and the latter 
probably not at all in warm water. They have a bad 
habit of disappearing when the thermometer rises. 
About the piers of the high bridge that extends to 
Pennsylvania avenue, a half mile above the boat house, 
