Forest and Stream 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1901, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. (_ 
Six Months, $2. ) 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 1901. 
j VOL. LVII.— No. G. 
I No. 346 Broadway, New York, 
The Forest and Stream is the recognized medium of entertain- 
ment, instruction and information between American sportsmen. 
The editors invite communications on the subjects to which its 
pages are devoted. Anonymous communications will not be re- 
garded. While it is intended to give wide latitude in discussion 
of current topics, the editors are not responsible for the views of 
correspondents. 
Subscriptions may begin at any time. Terms: For single 
copies, $4 per year, $2 for six months. For club rates and full 
particulars respecting subscriptions, see prospectus on page iii. 
THE PERCY SUMMER CLUB. 
The affairs of the Percy Summer Club have been 
brought to public attention anew by reported progress 
of the litigation in which the club has been involved for 
many years. The case is one of much interest because of 
its bearing upon the growing absorption of fishing waters 
by individuals and clubs, and because in it are involved 
considerations of the respective rights of the public and of 
the owners of waters which are posted. The story of the 
Percy Club has already been told in our columns, and in 
view of the new interest in it aroused by current publica- 
tions, may be reviewed briefly here. 
The Percy Summer Club was incorporated imder the 
laws of New Hampshire in 1882 for the purpose of ac- 
quiring a private preserve to which its members might 
resort for rest and recreation. The club acquired by 
purchase a lake of 350 afres in extent and about the same 
amount of land at Percy, in the town of Stark, Coos 
county. The lake was renamed Christine Lake. When 
the club made its purchase it was careful to secure title 
not only to the lots immediately adjoining Christine Lake, 
but also strips of land on both sides of a stream running 
into the lake, reaching to and including its source, and 
also land bordering the outlet to the point of its juncture 
with the Upper Ambnoosuc River. 
At the time of the purchase the laws of New Hamp- 
shire provided that any pond or body of water reserved 
for the propagation or preservation of fish might be pre- 
served for private use by posting with the proper notices, 
and a heavy fine for trespass was attached. It was under 
this law that the corporation was originally established. 
There was at that time no recognized acknowledgment 
fixing a limit to the size of lakes which might thus be 
preserved for private use. Later, however, the Legisla- 
ture passed a law declaring all lakes of more than twenty 
acres in extent public waters and excluding them from 
the privileges of the previous section. ~ 
But the club claims to hold its original title from the 
King of England, tracing it back to a time before the 
State had existence, and this title conveyed not only the 
land surrounding the lake, but the water and the land 
ujider the lake. Consequently, the club maintained, the 
act of the Legislature declaring waters of certain size open 
to the public could not apply to Christine Lake, because 
the club's title to the lake went back to a time before the 
State had anything to do with it. The Legislature there- 
upon passed a law to the effect that any person arrested 
for trespass in crossing wild lands- to visit public waters 
could not be held answerable for costs unless the damages 
amounted to more than $13.3.3. That was equivalent to 
throwing the costs of prosecution on the club, and de- 
prived it of redress against trespassers. Having in the 
New Hampshire courts received adverse decisions, the 
club transferred its property to a corporation formed 
under the laws of New Jersey, and proceeded against the 
trespassers in the United States Courts. The litigation 
which followed extended over several years, and cost 
more than the propert}-^ did originally. 
Finally there was an attempt made in the Legislature of 
New Hampshire to have the State assume the cost of the 
litigation, that had heretofore fallen on the trespassers, 
and that action led to a compromise by which the State 
gave the members of the Percy Summer Club, of New 
Jersej'. the right to form, a new corporation under the 
laws of New Hampshire, and to buy or lease interests be- 
longing to the Percy Summer Club, of New Hampshire. 
The club agreed to admit the fight of the public to fish in 
the lake under restrictions which should also apply to its 
own membership, and received from the State a charter 
which made trespass on the lands of the club other than 
passage QV?r a prescribed path punishably by a fine of 
$25 for the first offense and $50 for the second. The pub- 
lic obtained no right to leave boats on the lake or to 
camp on its shores. They were obliged to bring their 
boats with them and carry them away when they left. 
Shortly after the club got under way under its new 
charter (having leased the property from the New Jer- 
sey corporation, w^th whom it must be noted the title 
still remained), the United States Courts decided that 
the Percy Summer Club of New Jersey did own the lake 
and had the right to control fishing in it. The members 
did not immediately avail themselves of this decision. 
The New Hampshire law protected their land so thor- 
oughly from trespassers that they were disinclined to sur- 
render their charter. They lived under it three years. 
The open fishing, however, attracted so many visitors in 
the early part of the season, and they succeeded in deplet- 
ing the lake to such a degree, that there was no fishing 
for anybody. In 1899 it was practically decided to sur- 
render the New Hampshire charter and resume the rights 
accorded by the United States Court decision, and under 
these rights of absolute ownership in the property it 
sought to shut out fishermen by means of an injunction 
against two of the trespassers, Joseph and Jacob Astle. 
By a special act of the New Hampshire Legislature the 
Attorney-General of the State was ordered to assume the 
defense; and current reports state that Attorney-General 
Cushman has just filed his brief in the United States Cir- 
cuit Court. 
IN OTHER DAYS. 
What man is there who, separated by distance and 
years from the scenes of his boyhood, has not a standing 
resolution that he will revisit them some time when the 
strenuous struggle relaxes and there comes a week or 
two of spare time. No waters seem so beautiful as those 
wherein one, as a boy, caught his first fish, or rowed or 
sailed. No woods seem so beautiful as those wherein the 
first squirrels were sought, or the first expedition 
organized for the robbing of birds' nests. No fields seem 
so beautiful as those wherein pursuer and pursued played 
hounds and deer. 
The men of to-day whose youth was spent in the West 
have memories of boyhood days— of sport with gun and 
dog and rod and reel — which the boys of to-day can never 
have. There then was a frontier, long since pressed west- 
ward by civilization further and further away. Civiliza- 
tion in turn pressed from the West toward the East, till 
at last the frontier became a vague thing, then passed en- 
tirely away. 
The section then called the West was the West in fact, 
and it was a formidable undertaking to journey then from 
the East thereto. It is still called the West, but the term 
now rather denotes a point of the compass than a section. 
In those days the great prairie region of the West lay 
open and free to all alike. Minnesota, now teeming with its 
agriculture, its surface divided up into farms of proven 
ownership, was then an area of wild land, owned by the 
Government, and offered to all who would take on terms 
so nominal in respect to price that a farm was almost a 
gift. As in other sections of that great fertile region, 
game abounded everywhere. The killing of one hundred 
prairie chickens in a day excited no special comment. The 
great lakes abounded with fish. The muscalonge was one 
of the most common fishes at that time in those waters. 
The prairie as it then existed is now a thing of memory. 
The swarms of chickens, for in some sections they fairly 
swarmed, no longer exist, and only by stringent laws are 
they saved from utter extermination. The muscalonge 
have been exterminated in many waters, and are now rare 
even in many other waters in which they most abounded. 
These are memories, associated with the days of a game 
abundance, which can never be known from experience by 
the boys of the present. The market-hunter, the man 
who killed for count, which is an euphemistic expression 
for slaughter, and the man who killed without cessation 
because it was a gratification to kill and continue kill- 
ing, stripped the earth, east and west, of what should have 
been a nation's heritage, till now there is but a mere fra^'- 
ment of Avhat once existed so bountifully. 
These are memories which should carry their warnings 
into the present. Leave something of the game birds and 
the fish so that the boys of future years will have some- 
thing pleasurable with which to associate their boyhood 
days, when they are building up pleasant mernories for 
manhood's years. 
SNAP SHOTS. 
The supply of silkworm gut for leaders comes from 
Murcia in Spain. We have in this country a silkworm, 
the Attacus cecropia, which yields a gut far superior to 
the Spanish; and there are on record isolated instances 
of the successful drawing of the gut. Dr. Theodatus Gar- 
lick once drew a leader eight or nine feet long and strong 
enough to hold a salmon. Writing in 1884, in one of the 
chapters of his book on "Fly-Rods and Fly-Tackle," Mr. 
Henry P. Wells detailed what had been done in this direc- 
tion, and expressed a hope that others would take up the 
enterprise and so establish a new and profitable industry in 
this country. In the new edition of his work, Mr. Wells 
tells us that the hope expressed sixteen years ago has 
not been realized. Several attempts to make good gut 
from the American silkworms have resulted in failure ; but 
there is nothing in the past to prove that the American 
manufacture of silkworm gut leaders may not some day 
be achieved. The culture of the silkworm is an enterprise 
which has repeatedly engaged public attention, and many 
of us can remember the silkworm craze. A new attempt 
to establish a silkworm farm is making in South Carolina, 
where in the vicinity of Charleston, an Italian, Duke de 
Litta, has imported a stock of mulberry tree from Italy, 
which have been grown most successfully, and the actual 
culture of the silkworm will be undertaken next season. 
The monumental liar who has been roaming around 
the country and reporting in the newspapers his dis- 
coveries here and there — a skeleton team on the arid desert 
with horses and passengers done to mummies, shrieking 
children carried off by panthers, tender infants devoured 
by bears, and an aged woman transfixed by the hoop 
snake — has now struck Sayville, on the Long Island 
shore, and is picturing that quiet village in such lively 
colors that its people "do not recognize it when they find 
it described in the morning paper. The Sayville sea ser- 
pent, 100 feet long and ferocious in proportion, was fol- 
lowed by the Sayville shark, a real man-eater of p-rodigious 
girth and given to crushing rowboats; and now comes. a 
fish story of the Great South Bay packed with weakfish, 
which residents and visitors haul in by boatloads and bar- 
relfuls and dump for fertilizer on the cornfields. The 
people of Sayville were unmoved by the sea serpent and 
the shark, but they rise in indignation to deny the charge 
of wanton waste of food fish. There is good fishing in the 
bay, that they admit, but it is not just the Sayville way to 
use food fish for manure. And as for the monumental 
liar, he is invited to move on. 
In the large picture by the Irish artist Daniel Maclise. 
which has for its subject "The Sacrifice of Noah," depict- 
ing the scene of the offering by Noah after leaving the 
Ark. Shem is represented as a shepherd -huntsman 
equipped with spear and hunting knife. In the back- 
ground are shown the creatures coming out of the Ark; 
the domestic animals are grouping themselves together 
near the human beings, Avhile the others are dispersing, 
the giraffes, lions, panthers, tigers and elephants going 
east and south, and the elk and deer north, while a group 
of chamois and ibexes stand on a cliff. In like manner 
the domestic fowl are settling down near the Noah 
family, while the others fly off to the four points of the 
compass. Looking at the picture one cannot help thinking 
that if Shem, leaning on his spear, is half the sportsman 
the artist has painted, he is losing the opportunity of his 
life. If he had had the instinct of some hunters of the 
present day he would have settled for all time the destiny 
of some races of animals then and there. 
There was warm discussion of the Sunday fishing law 
in Massachusetts during the last session of the Legisla- 
ture, and it all resulted in retaining the prohibition against 
fishing- on that day. The law has been persistently vio- 
lated, in particular by the salt-water . anglers, just as 
similar statutes are disregarded by them elsewhere, and 
now the Fish Commissioners have issued a notice to their 
wardens and deputies, instructing them not to attempt 
to enforce the law, except as to certain streams. This is a 
recognition of the fact that in Massachusetts puWic opin- 
ion classes the Sunday fishing law with the prohibitions 
against pleasure driving, wheeling, yachting and other 
open-air recreations. As we have repeatedly urged a 
Sunday fishing law \yhich cannot be enforced by publig 
sentiment should be taken 06 from the statute boqks^, ^ 
