Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1900, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
Terms, 14 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy, i 
Six Months, ^. ( 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1900. { 
VOL. LV.— No. 12 
No. 846 Broadway, New Yorv 
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THE PARIS GOLD MEDAU 
The Forest and Stream has been' awarded the Gold 
Medal at the Paris Exposition for its exhibit, in the 
Palace of Forestry and Fisheries, consisting of fifty-three 
bound volumes from the beginning in 1873 to the close 
of 1899. 
BITS OF TALK. 
"It is a common enough experience, and I suppose 
>ou^•c all had it at one time or another in your event- 
ful careers," continued the man from Long Island. "You 
have been climbing up a mountain, for instance, and 
while you were actually doing your best on the face of 
rock, reaching up and grasping a jutting point and then 
feeling for a toe-hold and lifting yourself up, you did 
not think at all about the danger you were in. You . 
were simply being cautious. You knew that you must 
be careful or that you would fall; and your mind was 
concentrated upon performing the separate acts by which 
at last you reached the top. Now, whatever may have 
been your actual danger while doing this, you did not 
think much about it at the time, not in any very realizing 
way at least. Your attention, as I said, was fixed upon 
what you were doing. But afterward, when you have 
got all out of danger and look back on what you have 
been through, you are in the retrospection thrown 
into a state of fear. And the curious part of it is that 
you now magnify the actual danger and exaggerate to it a 
ridiculous degree." 
"That's so," said the man from Hackensack, N. J., 
"tor I've been scared after the act in just that way, and 
have vowed never to be such a fool again as to put my- 
self in the dangerous situation; and then I've gone back 
and done the same thing over again, and found that 
after all it wasn't anything to get scared about." 
"You don't always want to go and do it over again 
though." said the man who had been on the frontier 
out West when there was a frontier, "not if it's In- 
dians. I remember in Alontana on one occasion all of a 
sudden it became a duty I owed to my family and my 
country to get back to camp by the shortest route and 
in the quickest way and the briefest time. I lit out, and 
the Indians lit out after me, and we had it nip-and-tuck 
until I fetched 'up all a-running,' as the saying is, among 
our boys ; and the reds, baffled of their prey — as I'd say if 
I were writing this for publication and not as a guarantee 
of good faith — withdrew. And then, when I'd got my 
breath, I was scared. You see, while I was running I 
had no time to think enough about it to be really fright- 
ened. I realized the necessity of flight, and put my best 
foot forward ; but it wasn't a fright in any such sense as 
the panic I was in when I cooled off and had time to 
realize just what a close call I had had, or thought I 
had." 
"And while you are talking about this," said the Bos- 
ton man, "you might consider the great moral effect of 
.^uch an ex post facto fright. If my boy were as big a 
fool with a gun as are some of the grown men we read 
about in the neswpapers, I would wish for him an ex- 
perience I had of my own when I was a boy. I was 
showing to a boy companion my new gun, which had 
just come from the city, and was expatiating upon the 
beauty of its barrels, the grain of the stock and the 
beautiful action of the trigger, when the trigger illus- 
trated its beautiful action for itself — the gun went off 
and the load just singed my companion's ear. He was 
scared on the spot, as his white face showed, and I was 
some startled too. but I had the real fright afterward, 
when I spent more than a wretched fifteen minutes in 
thinking about the incident that night. The fright did 
its work for me. I have carried the lesson all through 
my life." 
"Yes." said the man from Hackensack. "A fright I 
once had taught me just such a lesson ; though the in- 
cident occurred long after I had become a man and 
should have put away childish things, including thought- 
less playing with fire. I once had the fight and fright 
of my life in the Maine woods in trying to put out a 
fire .1 had accidentally started in a clump of birches, when 
the leaves were down and the whole country was as 
.dry as tinder. It was accomplished only after tremen- 
dous exertion, and was but barely accomplished at that. 
The wind was high, and under the conditions the fire 
would have been extensive and frightful. My experience 
was just such as you have told. I was so busy fighting 
the fire that the actual panic came afterward, when I 
was lying in camp and thinking about it. My scare was 
also what you might call an admonitory scare, for from 
that day to this I have been as careful of fire in the woods 
as any one ought to be or could be in a powder maga- 
zme 
Admonitory scare' is just the expression," added 
the Long Islander. "I would tell you about one I had 
■once upon a time myself if the thing that scared me had 
not been so foolish that I am almost ashamed to con- 
fess it. Perhaps the fact that I was young and new to 
shooting may be some mitigation. It was nothing more 
nor less than firing a charge of buckshot into a clump 
of bushes where I had heard a rustle. At the moment I 
thought it was a rabbit. Two or three hours afterward 
I came to a realizing sense that it might have been a 
human being; and I had an experience of this subsequent 
stage of fright we have been talking about. It was an 
admonition about conduct ia the woods that I have never 
forgotten. I learned my lesson then just as thoroughly 
and as permanently as I would have learned it had there 
actually been a human being there to be slaughtered by 
my foolishness." 
"Your postponed and belated admonitory scares are 
doubtless useful enough in their way," commented the 
frontiersman, "and presumably the world has been a 
safer and happier place for the rest of us to live in be- 
cause of them, but it strikes me- that I'd want my boy 
to be scared before he shot into the bushes instead of 
waiting to find out afterward if it was a rabbit or a man. 
This post-foolishness scare, so to speak, has too much 
suggestion of locking the stable door after the horse is 
stolen. The sort of admonitory scare calculated to do the 
most good is the scare before the fact, not after it." 
"Capital in theory," retorted the man from Hacken- 
sack, "but the solemn fact is that there is no teacher 
like experience. You might preach till doomsday and 
the fool with the gun would persist in his foolishness. 
But once he is scared, as I was scared, he makes him- 
self a present of a lot of wisdom, and he gets it for 
keeps." 
"Yes," concluded the man from Boston, "it's only 
when we've been scared afterward that we stay scared." 
THE MAINE WOODS FIRES. 
From many quarters comes the same report of drought 
and unfavorable conditions for fishing and shooting caused 
by the extreme dryness. Mr. G. Hills, writing from Co- 
lumbia county, N. Y., says that the covers are so dry 
that a woodcock might as well try to bore in a tree as 
in the ground, and the birds will be very scarce this sea- 
son. Mr. Henry Talbott writes from Washington that 
the great heat and scarce fly water have seriously re- 
stricted opportunities for fishing in the waters of the 
Potomac and elsewhere in the vicinity. From Massa- 
chusetts comes the story of forest fires which have de- 
stroyed many acres of the venerable Plymouth woods, 
which were described in our issue of last week: many 
square miles of territory have been devastated, and many 
thousands of dollars' worth of property has been de- 
stroyed. The fires have, of course, driven out the deer, 
which have dispersed throughout a wide extent of terri- 
tory. 
We have seen a private letter written from Maine 
warning against venturing into any one of the wilderness 
country of that State anjrwhere south and east of Ka- 
tahdin. "The cotmtry is as dry as tinder," says the 
writer, "with no rain since spring along the coast and 
over in Knox and Waldo counties, and the forest fires are 
the worst in seventy-five years. Hundreds of thousands 
of dollars of good timber has been burned already, and 
every day th^ heavy winds (Jrive the fires into fresl^ 
fields ; some of thei^ have a frontage of eight or ten miles 
each ; and there are as many as six of these great fires in 
Piscataquis, Penobscot and Hancock counties. The 
danger northward is not from these fires, but from ones 
set by careless sportsmen, which may blaee up any day 
and become dangerous to life. I should not want to 
travel on any long grassy stream like the Passadumkeag, 
for example," adds the writer, "though camping on a 
lake shore would be all right. But no long trips until 
after the rains." Happily, at a date subsequent to the 
writing of this letter, a twenty-four-hour rain has done a 
deal of good in curtailing and diminishing, though not 
exitnguishing, the fires, and the situation in the Maine 
woods is not one so full of peril as it was before the 
rain came. With the woods in such tinder-like condi- 
tion as they have been this summer, to go into them is 
virtually to take one's life in one's hands. 
Our Boston correspondent tells us that the Maine 
guides resent the implication that forest fires have been 
set by the carelessness of themselves or the sportsmen 
ttnder their conduct. This is a natural and commend- 
able sentiment. No one in the world is more careful, 
even to the point of over caution, in respect to the safety 
of camp-fires than your experienced woodsman; but on 
the other hand there are few individuals so fatuous as to 
fire and its consequences as is the green sportsman in 
the woods. The Maine guides cannot speak for the 
Massachusetts and New York and Pennsylvania and 
Mississippi men who invade the Maine forests and too 
often have no adequate conception of the danger of 
leaving camp-fires unguarded, or of throwing lighted 
matches or burning cigar stumps upon the dry ground. 
POUND NETS AND GAME FISH. 
Before the League of Salt Water Fishermen in this city 
last Monday evening Mr. Chas. A. Shriner discussed the 
advisabilities' and practicabilities — which are very ofteri 
quite distinct things — in relation to abolishing or regu- 
lating net fishing in New York waters. Mr. Shriner 
served for several years as Chief Game and Fish Pro- 
tector of New Jersey, and administered his office in a 
way that reflected great credit on himself and was of 
great advantage to the State, until Governor Voorhees. 
out of unworthy motives, displaced him. His experience 
in the practical work of protection, his long and intelli- 
gent study of the problem, his familiarity with the situa- 
tion and his maturity of judgment as to what is feasible 
and what is not, entitle his views to a respectful con- 
sideration. 
Mr. Shriner is of opinion that instead of striving for 
absolute prohibition of the use of nets, a wiser course 
would be to endeavor so to regulate pounds and purse 
nets as to insure a sufficient immunity for game fish, 
while at the same time permitting the taking of fish which 
are not game, and which can be taken on a commercial 
scale only by the employment of pounds and purses. He 
recommends legislation looking to this end, and has 
drafted a measure which he recommends for enactment 
by the New York Legislature. 
Mr. Shriner's proposed law to regulate the takin'g of 
fish with purse or shirred nets makes it unlawful will- 
fully to take in such nets, in the manner in which men- 
haden are taken, porgies, bluefish. weakfish or any other 
kinds of food fish within tide waters within the jurisdic- 
tion of the State, including the waters of the ocean 
within three nautical miles of the coast line, provided 
that the fishing crew may take food fish for food while 
employed in fishing. The act would also prohibit con- 
verting any food fish so unlawfully taken into oil or any 
kind of fertilizing material. 
The proposed act to regulate fishing with pound nets 
prohibits the erection or maintenance of pound nets in 
the tide waters, including the waters of the Atlantic 
Ocean within three nautical miles of the coast line, except 
in compliance with the provisions of the act. It is made 
unlav^'TfuI to maintain a pound net of which the leader 
shall begin at a point less than 1,000 feet from low water 
mark, or which shall have a mesh of less than $^2 inches, 
or the pocket of which shall have a mesh of less than 3 
inches. The pockets of nets must be raised on Saturday 
before the hour of noon, weather permitting, and remain 
raised so as to render them incapable ®f retaining any 
fish, until midnight between Sunday and Monday. Biotl-j 
l^\y§ provide for severe penalties. 
