Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly- Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
COPTRIGHT, 1899, BY FoREST AND STREAM PUBLISHING Co. 
Terms, $4 a Year. 1G Cts. a Copy. J 
. Six Months, $2. \ 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1899. 
/ VOL. LIII.— No. 19. 
X No. 846 Broadway, New York 
SAM'S BOY. 
There could mot be a happier theme for loving delinea- 
tion by the pen of Rowland E. Robinson than the telling 
of how Uncle Lisha set about teaching Sam Lovel's boy 
"the art of being a boy," and a Dan vis boy, it is to be 
remembered. Nor could any story be told in Forest ano 
Stream more certainly assured of a sympathetic, appre- 
ciative and delighted reading. Mr. Robinson has sent us 
the opening chapters. They are in his best vein. We 
shall begin their publication in our issue of Dec. 2. 
CORNELIUS W. SMITH. 
Cornelius W. Smith passed away at his home in Syra- 
cuse, N. Y., on Saturday, Oct. 28, aged fifty-four years. 
His death was caused by heart disease, and was very 
sudden. Mr. Smith was a successful patent lawyer, and 
like so many of his fellow members of the bar, he found 
his recreation in angling. No angler living in Syracuse, 
where for many years an irrepressible conflict has been 
waged between the law-abiding fisherman and the netting 
pirate, could avoid having a lively and personal interest in. 
the cause of fish protection and the making and enforcing 
of adequate laws to accomplish protection. For a long 
period Mr. Smith labored hand in hand with the members 
of the Anglers' Association of Onondaga county in their 
effort to protect the local waters from the illegal nets ; 
and when, a few years ago, the New York State Associa- 
tion for the Protection of Fish and Game was re- 
organized and given new life, he entered into the move- 
ment with interest and devotion, which were unremitting 
in the service to the end. As a member of successive 
committees on legislation he was one of the few members 
of the organization who did the actual hard work; and 
his counsel was valued by his associates because it was 
based upon a familiarity with the subject gained by care- 
ful study and matured consideration. At the last meeting 
of the League, Mr. Smith was made its president for the 
current year. His death will be sincerely mourned; but 
the influence of his life will not abruptly end. What he 
did as a member of the League he did not for himself, but 
for others ; such example of an exalted sense of the citizen's 
duty to the community as was afforded in the game and 
fish protective services of Cornelius W. Smith may well be 
an incitement to others who are thoughtful for the public 
good. ^ 
THE SIDE-HUNT. 
This is the season of the side-hunt, the side-hunters and 
the side-hunted. The side-hunt is a competitive slaughter 
by a company of shooters divided into rival squads, each 
of which endeavors to kill more game than the rest. The 
side-hunters usually comprise all of the male population 
who can muster arms, from the doddering pensioner for 
total disability to the callow youth who has never ere this 
handled a gun afield. The side-hunted include all forms 
of animal life large enough to be seen through rifle sights 
or over the rib of a shotgun. The stake is usually a dinner 
or supper, at which is served such of the da3''s ingathering 
as may be fit to eat, the losing side paying expenses. In 
many districts the annual side-hunt is an established 
custom, which has been followed from remote times, and 
holds a place of merited popularity as an occasion of 
good-natured rivalry in which the victors may crow over 
the losers and the jovial incidents of the day and night 
afford material for frequent rehearsal. Side-hunting is 
essentially an old-fashioned custom, and it is also of 
those old-fashioned institutions whose reasonableness, 
justification, excuse for being, has been outgrown in the 
newly developed conditions of the times. Whatever may 
have been the merits of the side-hunt as hunted b.y mt 
fathers, it is to-day i^n most localities altogether wrong, 
foolish and indefensible. 
The siderhunt is wrong because it is a competition in 
the slaughter of wild li*e. All the tendency of the times in 
.growing sentiment, conviction, legislation and practice is 
;ii the direction of restricting the destruction <si game and 
•-iraiting the amount which may be taken by an individual 
in a season. But the spirit of the side-hunt is m direct 
opposition to this doctrine and practice of moderation. 
Because it is thus in conflict with the recognized sound 
principles of wise game conservation it should be 
abolished- 
The side-hunt is wrong because it is foolishly destructive 
of wild life. The "game" listed in these hunts comprises 
not only such birds and animals as have a recognized place 
among the legitimate spoils of sport, but often include as 
.•well those species which should be spared and given im- 
munity, either because they are useful to man, or at least 
because, being absolutely worthless when dead, the killing 
■of them is necessarily useless and wanton. When a sports- 
man sets out for quail or partridge or duck or deer or 
prairie chicken or hare, he goes for game and game alone, 
and does not kill indiscriminately and wantonly other birds 
and animals which come across his path. The side-hunter 
on the contrary . pots everything. It all counts. The 
slaughter is indiscriminate. If there exists any reasonable 
defense of the wholesale and indiscriminate slaughter of 
the wild creatures of the field and wood, we have never 
read it in print nor heard it propounded ; and until defense 
shall be produced and made good, the side-hunt, which is 
only another name for such indefensible slaughter, must 
ibe reckoned equally without excuse and subject to repro- 
bation. 
The time has come when the side-hunt should be con- 
demned by public opinion and prohibited by statute. The 
game laws should take cognizance of it and forbid it. 
A COUNTRY ROAD. 
When the Man with the Hoe, homeward plodding his 
weary way and trudging along the turnpike, observes in 
ithe dust a circular scratched depression, in size and shape 
like the crown of the hat of the barefooted boy who 
always catches the trotit the city angler can't get; and 
:sees leading to this depression and across it and beyond 
it interminably over the hills and far away a ribbon track 
in the earth, he says to himself "dusting pa'tridge," and 
"one of them wheel fellers." And then, perhaps, he 
reflects that when the rider who had made the ribbon 
track come upon the partridge which had made the dusting 
bed, there were a surprised man and not less an astonished 
ibird. 
The wheel has given such an engine for approaching the 
wild creatures which haunt country roads as man never has 
■enjoyed since Adam went out from his Garden. It moves 
so silently and glides so swiftly — in steadiness and speed 
like the wind — and comes so suddenly and unexpectedly 
that the surprised and dazed bird is for the instant too 
'bewildered to make flight. When one is walking through 
the woods or wandering along the woods-bordered road, 
his coming is noted by ear or scent or eye, and the wild 
thing has abundant time to take its bearings and make 
■deliberate choice of direction of flight. But with the 
wheelman's approach the case is quite different. The 
apparition is so sudden and the instantaneousness of it is 
so overwhelming that even the wary partridge forgets its 
cunning, and becomes even as the stupid domestic hen, 
which is wont to scurry every which way in the road before 
its final desperate whirr to one side — or the other. Nor 
is the surprise of the encounter always wholly on one 
side ; for the eye of the wheelman, however keen, is apt to 
be engaged with the scene before him in its larger aspects, 
so that such a detail as the form of a grouse does not 
■disengage itself from the mass until the bird flushes with 
startling wing beat. But if the game be seen from a 
distance and all unalarmed and unsuspecting give the 
rider opportunity of approach, the experience is likely to 
be one of the well-remembered pleasures of wheeling. 
The average rider does not carry firearms; he is one of 
thos6 who do their hunting without a gun, and to him 
come the rewards of that mode of intercourse with the 
wild beings of field and forest. These may not always 
"be "game ;" the denizens of the country road are ex- 
tremely cosmopolitan, and for the most part, it must be 
confessed, do not hold an exhalted rank in the social 
scale- which obtains among the folk of feathers and fur. 
The man awheel may run into partridge or quail, or, if he 
be traversing Maine roads, an antlered buck; but on the 
average countrj^ road he is much more likely to surprise 
woodchucks and chipmunks and snakes. Nevertheless if 
he be the philosopher we count him., intent upon getting 
out of his ride all that .is in it, he will be grateful even for 
the humblest, of these creatures which cross his path. 
Partridge and cyclist both may well affect such a 
charhiing bit of country road as Mr. Davison has pictured 
for us. Nor is the scene a fancy picture, nor the incident 
fictitious. The rider is Mr. J. L. Davison, of Lockport, 
N. Y., who has for these many years been a well-known 
contributor our columns; a^d his bearing down upoi^ 
the partridge was an actual experience in one of his wheel- 
ing trips. It is here so admirably depicted, he tells us, that 
a camera could hardly have photographed it more faith- 
fully. It is an enticing scene : the winding road bordered 
on either side by fragrant shrubs, and with its graceful 
curves and gentle grades and ever-changing vistas and 
play of light and shade, affording never-failing interest 
and piquant pleasure, with the culmination in such meet- 
ings with the wild creatures which are wont to haunt the 
path. All this the picture tells; and it tells us too that in 
about thirteen seconds the unsuspecting bird in the imme- 
diate foreground is to have one of the most exciting 
moments of its life. 
SNAP SHOTS. 
Complaints of the inefficiency of the mail service re^aeh 
us this autumn more frequently than ever before. Such 
complaints are as annoying to us as the failures of our cor- 
respondents or readers to receive their mail are to therfl. 
Such complaints indicate carelessness or blundering some- 
where, and when they are received we try to ascertain 
who is responsible, in order that the fault may be cor- 
rected. We are no more infallible than other people, but it 
must be said that the blame for these failures very seldom 
rests with this office, but must be usually charged to the 
post office authorities. The officials of the New York 
Pqst Office assure us that they do the best they can with 
the very limited facilities at hand, but that in view of the 
recent great increase in business they are absolutely 
swamped by the amount of mail matter that passes through 
the office. They have no room for the mails, nor a force 
sufficient to handle them. Appeals to the Post Office De- 
partment in Washington have hitherto failed to give them 
the relief for which they ask. It would seem from this 
statement that the Department in Washington is re- 
sponsible for the greater part of the annoyance caused by 
the failures in the mail service, and that it is to the De- 
partment that appeals must be made for relief. The Post 
Office Department can only be reached through Repre- 
sentatives to Congress, and it is to his Congressman that 
the man who fails to receive his paper on time must apppal. 
This certainly seems like going a long way around to 
correct an abuse, but we can see no other present remedy. 
An Indiana party of big-game hunters, who returned the 
other day from a trip to the Rockies, bringing home little 
game, are quoted as saying that they Were repaid for the 
journey by the scenery. Of course they were. That is 
one of the considerations in hunting and fishing trips 
which make our experiences with rod and gun what they 
are. It is not all of fishing to catch a string of fish, nor 
all of shooting to get the game. The man who can go to 
the Rocky Mountains for the first time, in pursuit of 
game, and securing none, can return home altogether 
chagrined and disappointed, must have fixed his gaze 
wholly upon the earth and failed to lift his eyes to the ever- 
lasting hills. In the fond memory of the mountains which 
goes through life with him who has camped in their 
sublime solitudes, the actual game secured has not by any 
measure the first place. No hunter of antlered trophies 
may seek them in the Rockies and missing them count 
the expedition an entire failure. To have looked upon the 
mountains, to have pitched tent amid them, this is to have 
been rewarded for the trip. 
At last it seems as if the English were going to take 
some steps to protect South African game, though for a 
number of species this protection will come too late. A 
project is on foot — ^to which it is intimated the Foreign 
Office will lend its countenance — to establish reserves 
where game shall be absolutely protected and shall have 
the opportunity to re-establish itself. It is proposed to 
hold a meeting in London in January next to discuss this 
subject and to determine if practicable what measures 
shall be taken to bring about the desired result. Mean- 
time, well-known big-game hunters are actively interesting 
themselves in the project, and one of these is starting 
for South Africa, taking with hiiri a naturalist, in order 
to study the actual conditions on the ground. It is 
certainly high time that action should be taken in this 
matter. South African game has too long been regarded 
solely from the commercial point of view — ^the money 
value of hides, horns or ivory when removed from the car- 
cass, It should be protected before, like the Americar^ 
buflFalo, it ha.s been exterminated. 
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