March ,s,i^l FOREST AND STjRElAM 
iaich. I sawed it to the rough shape and then gouged it 
out with a draw plane, a lathe plane and glass. I 
smoothed it with sandpaper, leaving a thickening Hear the 
tip for strength, and another near the handle in the slope 
for the same purpose. The blade is nearly half an inch 
thick down the center, and a little more than an eighth 
at the edges. The handle has the usual shape, a grip 
at the top, a bulge in the middle and a small handful 
at the blade. It balances where the little finger of the 
right hand grips it. 
As I worked it down, the rivermen agreed that it was 
a good one, hut they shook their heads when I shaved the 
blade so "thin." One said the handle was too short, and 
that I'd have to sit down to use it. He did not know 
that was what I intended to do. 
I noticed that one of the men who> was around con- 
siderable did not seem very frisky — had a sort of a halt 
to his walk, a lack of ginger in his arm motions. I 
overtook him on my way to the store on the 4th and 
remarked that he seemed to be a bit under the weather. 
"Yas-s," he replied. "I got into a little racket last 
August up on Tug River, West Virginia. Two bullets hit 
me in the left arm, one in the right and two. in the body. 
E'f it hadn't been for this yer suspender buckle he'd got 
me sure." 
In the right suspender buckle was a .38 bullet hole. 
They "had a little falling out two-three times," and Ruble 
got the best of it; then "he" shot Ruble when Ruble 
thought "he" was "friendly" again. 
The boat was done in a couple of days. It looked well, 
but this man and that man said something had been done 
that oughtn't to be, and that other things were wrong. _ It 
was dead log poplar, 14 feet long, 3 feet 10 inches. wide 
and the perpendicular sides were a foot high in the 
middle. It was "sharp" at one end and "square" at the 
other. One man said it ought to have two more inches 
of rake forward. But I was satisfied. 
I left it out in the wind all night; in the morning I 
could see through the bottom. I ran it down to the ford 
and had the old river man, Hughes, caulk it up, and then 
I put it into the stream to soak. 
That night I listened to Jimmy Hughes s play the 
"Hounds Running" on the banjo. It was a stirring piece. 
The old dogs bellowed along, and the little dogs yelped 
along, round the hills, now faintly, again loudly, now 
with bursts of joy, again with baffled yells, as they 
lost the scent. It was worth a long delay and a lot of 
trouble to hear that music. In the Holston store I heard 
a florid, 250-pound storekeeper and wiry, bony trapper 
with black whiskers play a violin and a banjo together. 
That, too, was stirring. 
In the morning the mush ice was running too thick 
to start early. I was sitting by the fireplace waiting for 
the day to warm up a bit, when I heard giggles among 
the Hughes girls, while the boys grinned. Then I de- 
tected the odor of my tooth wash. A little observing 
showed that Will had mistaken the pretty red stuff for 
perfumery and had taken some of it for his handkerchief. 
They enjoyed it, and so did I. 
On Monday morning, Jan. 6, at 10:50 o'clock A. M., my 
stuff being all in the boat, I sat down on the stern seat 
and was pushed off by Jimmy Hughes. A wave of the 
handstand away I went. A mill dam was half a mile 
below. It was built of cobblestones and tree branches — 
a mere stone fence tossed across the river slantwise to 
shunt the water into an undershot wheel. I grounded 
on it, but pried myself over with an oar. A little rapid 
below ran me toward a stone cliff fifty feet high, but the 
Maori paddle saved me, and away I went round the bend, 
south-bound again. 
T had to watch out for fish trap dams and mill dams, 
but I had a list of them and felt reasonably safe, though 
the novelty of the situation made me cringe a little, and 
eye the water ahead nervously. 
I was in shoals of mush ice which melted slowly, but 
the sun was warm and bright. Altogether, few days 
have been more pleasing to me than this one. I need 
paddle only a little at intervals if I wished, and yet I 
was moving along constantly into and out of the shadows 
of the hills, through countless clear reflections. 
A moment of excitement was when I saw a fall ahead — 
one over a ledge a foot high, but not quite perpendi- 
cular. A pair of black ducks jumped out of the water 
ahead. Then over another little ledge of rocks I went, tip- 
ping a little on a hidden rock. The scenes changed— 
rockv ledges and cliffs, tree-grown banks and glimpses of 
cornfields and houses. Two men hailed me to be "put 
across," and I accommodated them, receiving some valu- 
able information in return. That was some six miles- 
below Holston. 
I ate my "snack" which Mrs. Hughes had put up for 
me — cold biscuit, cold fried pork, jam and apple butter 
sandwiches — floating along on an eddy. Such luxury ! I 
could eat, sit and see the land loom up before me, drift 
past me and fade away behind me. 
It was a study in itself to see the drift lodged in the 
trees, grass tufts, twigs, corn shocks, boards, split rails, 
even logs, were in the tree branches ten feet above the 
water, all of them, save the heavier sticks, in matted 
tufts so tightly woven that they could be thrown, if one 
could release them from the support. 
I stopped some little leaks with putty. Ordinarily 
teaks in such a place would have worried me, but now 
they scarcely disturbed me. I received some friendly 
greetings from the dwellers along the higher parts of the 
banks. One man yelled: 
"I reckon you all's going west?" 
I said "Yes." , . 
How far I was going was a question that I scarcely 
thought of then. "Down the Tennessee" was the gen- 
eral idea I had in mind. 
I traveled only six hours, yet I was more than twelve 
miles from my starting point, when I went up the bank 
at a landing and across the bottom to a white house. I 
expected to sleep in my boat when I made calculations 
for the ride, but I was told that it would be best not 
to till I got to the Big Holston, because of the cold, and 
the chances of rheumatism. After some of my wet walks 
I had felt a new sort of ache in my finger joints and in 
my knees. I decided to not take any chances in that 
regard. 
It was the Raven's Nest locality where I landed; 
Thomas B, Hendricks was the man's name — an old, white- 
bearded man, who had bought more land than he cotild 
swing to comfortably when it came to meeting interest 
and payments. He had not been satisfied with a mere 
300 acres; some of his neighbors had larger places, so 
he got another adjoining farm, and now the" burden of 
a $2,500 mortgage has drawn his lips, pitched his voice 
and inflicted a secret wound in his pride. 
I had to wait for the mush ice again on the following 
morning. The river was oppressively quiet after I bade 
good-bye to Hendricks, his wife and children at the land- 
ing place. The flakes and splinters of ice which rustled 
and cracked along the banks or against occasional mid- 
stream obstructions, were very interesting that morning, 
"Mush ice" I had never seen before. Now the puddings 
hung to the side of my boat, softer than the solid cakes, 
yielding to the touch, yet bearing one's craft along- in 
its grasp. It held the boat end-on if one went to the 
center of a "cake." It resisted efforts to split it and often 
refused to be dodged. In the ripples the ice particles all 
separated and glimmered and gleamed, casting a thousand 
sparkles of light in every direction — confusing one's eye- 
sight and making one forgetful of possible rocks. Below 
the ripple the scattered fleet made haste to swarm to- 
gether again, and floated on in shapely masses four or 
five inches thick, some of the flakes clear of the water 
by a half inch, others far below the surface, crowded 
down by the upper bits. 
When I reached Flennor's Dam I got out of the boat 
to take a look at it. Water oozed over the cobbles clean 
across it. There was only one place where I could run 
it, and that was close to the west bank. The water 
dragged ever there and broke into a tumult of quick 
water just below, bending sharply to the left. In the 
bend was an ugly rock head. 1 feared an upset, so I 
carried all my stuff to a good landing below the riffle or 
shoal. Then I got into my boat, shoved off and headed 
for the chute. I went a-zipping. I tried to go outside 
the rocks, but saw that I couldn't, so I shoved inside of 
it. The boat was too wide and wedged between the rock 
and the bank. I pried loose, however, safely made the 
landing place, loaded up and went on. Flennor's Dam 
was one of the "bad places." 
Whether I was lazy or industrious, whether I paddled 
or not, the land went sliding by, a long procession of 
cliffs, corn bottoms, sycamores and woods. It was a 
kind of play. It did not seem as if I had. anything to 
do with it. I felt like the boy looks who says he isn't 
doing anything. What right had I to be carried along 
like that without doing anything, without even walking? 
1 felt as though I was stealing a ride, getting something 
for nothing. I wanted to repay the river for its kindness. 
It was the feeling that moved the Indians when they cast 
the feathers of the bluejay, the cardinal and the reed bird 
into the gentle current. It must needs be a beautiful 
offering; for such the river shows its appreciation. It 
was a good Indian who said : 
"Be kind, oh, traveler, to the spirits which see thee 
on thy way. Pay thy respects to the tree spirit, to the 
rock spirit, to the wind that may caress thee, to the river 
that carries thy canoe." 
With all reverence, I tried to do as the Indians did, 
tried to see as they would have seen. 
The afternoon of the seventh passed slowly by. At 
2 o'clock I stopped to mail a letter at Mandota, and at 
3:15 o'clock a mile below I came to another dam. Thirty 
feet had been washed out at the center, through which the 
water poured in a wide, crinkly w r ave, to break into danc- 
ing white and spread over a fan-like shoal, rock studded 
and fearsome below. I carried my pack around the dam 
and then took to the wave in the center, and went 
through with my mouth open and my paddle dipping 
cleverly enough. A couple of miles below I thought to find 
a house to sleep in, but the region was suffering from 
smallpox and other scares. At plumb dark I went to a 
house across a field. I could stay in a little house down 
the road, a young man said. I went to the house, pack 
and all, by the light of my little lantern, but the youth 
and his mother had changed their minds, so the hired 
man and the son came down to the shanty. The boy had 
a revolver in his right-hand trouser's pocket, and the 
hired man had a double-barreled shotgun. The son 
said: t-i^l 
"I neveh said you all could stay yere. I neveh did, seh; 
no seh, no seh, I didn't." 
I had to laugh at the situation. When I stamped my 
foot into my shoes (I had taken them off), both men 
jumped three inches into the air. I prepared to start 
leisurely enough. 
"Ef you all don't hurry up, they'll be to bed deown 
the rivah," the son said in a tone of voice that made 
me pity him. With a revolver in one hand and a man 
to back him, with a double-barreled shotgun, he was so 
frightened at one man that his voice shook and broke 
with a whine. 
My pack fixed to my satisfaction, my lantern in one 
hand and cased rifle in the other, I started for my boat. 
I fastened the pack in the bow, so that it would stay with 
the boat in case of an upset, then shoved out into the 
river and headed down stream in the night under a 
cloudy sky. I could hear the roar of a rapid ahead, sound- 
ing loud in the gloom. It was now my turn to be scared. 
Raymond S. Spears. 
A Snake as Sign of Gentle Spring:, 
New Bern, N. C, March 4. — Signs of spring are not 
wanting here. Robins and purple grackles have gone 
north. English snipe are coming in from the south. 
Frogs are piping on the marshy edges of the ponds. Last 
week a hand, organ delighted the little 'coons, and on 
Sunday girls in white muslin shirtwaists were sitting 
bareheaded on the porches. To-day I saw a swallow 
darting over a plowed field. And if these facts be not 
sufficiently convincing, I may add that on Saturday B. B. 
Mallison, of Pine Grove, about fifteen miles east of this 
•town, brought in the skin of a rattlesnake which he had 
killed on Wednesday. It is four inches in diameter and 
six feet long, exclusive of the rattles, of which there are 
eighteen. The snake showed so much fight and was so 
aggressive that Mallison had to use a twelve-foot pole 
to kill it, being afraid to use a six-foot stick he had. 
— — 
Where Sparrows Sleep. 
At the first touch of autumn the careful man dons a 
heavier suit of underwear and a light overcoat, and when 
winter begins to show his teeth, the woolens and the 
ulster are hauled out for service. Not only this, the 
furnace is started and the house made generally com- 
fortable and a richer quality and more generous quantity 
of food indulged in. 
With the birds of the air no such precautions are pos- 
sible, and as if conscious of this, the vast majority of 
them solve the problem by simply betaking themselves to 
a more genial climate. Why do the few remain? That 
is a question that no naturalist can answer. 
We see the ptarmigan choosing to brave the terrors of 
the Arctic winter, and at every degree south some other 
variety choosing to put up with more or less cold and 
hunger when a flight of a few days might take them to 
comfort and plenty. Do they enjoy the cold? It would 
seem absurd to think so. Have they not intelligence 
enough to tell them that they can get away from it? 
That seems not at all probable in view of what we know 
of other birds. 
But the fact is, this whole question of migration or non- 
migration is very much of a mystery. If one bird changes 
its habitat with the seasons, why does not another? 
Doubtless the habits of birds in this regard were acquired 
millions of years ago, when conditions were very different 
from what they are now, but having no precise "data as to 
these conditions,' we cannot form an accurate opinion. 
The researches of science may some day throw light on 
the question, though it is hardly likely. 
However, what I wish to speak of now is the wonder- 
ful endurance of one familiar variety which remains with 
us during the winter. I refer to the house sparrow 
(Passer domesticus) , erroneously called here the "Eng- 
lish" sparrow, it being, in fact, common to all Europe. 
For seven or eight months of the year this pervasive 
importation finds life generally very pleasant and easy, but 
one day in late November it begins to snow, and there- 
after with but few intermissions the winter is on the 
warpath with a vengeance. But P. domesticus does not 
lose heart. He faces the situation bravely and even cheer- 
fully. And remember what he has to do: he has to adapt 
himself physically without any additional covering or 
any more food — nay, much less — and without any more 
sheltered place to sleep. I say without any of these he 
has to adapt himself within a week or two to a fall of pos- 
sibly forty or fifty degrees in the temperature of the air. 
Why doesn't he freeze up and die in a night? That is 
the wonder. 
Far from succumbing to the sudden cold, he seems 
just as brisk and cheery as during the halcyon days of 
summer. He is about at the first peep of dawn. You 
will see him in the streets, in the back yards, on the 
decks of ferry boats — plowing through a snow heap, 
hopping in the frozen gutter, half-buried in an ash can- 
anywhere and everywhere, in fact, that there is a chance 
of picking up a living. Let a boy fancying that he has 
grown tame with the cold and hunger, try to catch him 
and you will see what a fool he will make of that boy. 
Having satisfied his hunger (though this is by no means 
always possible), he will seek out some sunny or sheltered 
spot in the afternoon and sit there with a number of 
companions, preening himself and gossiping for an hour 
or more. He has always an eye out for his mortal enemy, 
the cat, and when he sees one he utters loud n«tes of 
alarm and defiance. 
At the approach of night he is to be seen fitting hither 
and thither in search of a lodging. Perhaps the ther- 
mometer is not very much above zero, and it excites one's 
pity to think of the only lodging procurable by the anxious 
seeker. The eaves of a roof, the hole in a cornice, the 
opening over a porch, a crevice in a wall, a leafless vine 
or tuft of shrubbery — in some one of these must the night 
be passed. Let the man who raises such a storm because 
there is not enough heat in his room or his bed lacks 
sufficient covering just imagine P. domesticus sitting all 
night in one of the places mentioned. And then let him 
imagine him waking up to find no breakfast ready and 
perhaps half a foot of new-fallen snow on the ground. 
Although P. domesticus is a canny bird, it would appear 
as if he lacked intelligence to do the best possible for his 
comfort; otherwise his love of a certain roost must be 
stronger than his love of comfort. In evidence of this, I 
may state a couple of facts with which I am familiar. 
On Brooklyn Heights there is what I may call an alley- 
way made by two houses built close together, but not join- 
ing. It is completely exposed to the bay, and when it 
blows there is a perfect hurricane in the alley, while the 
cold, if it be winter, must be something terrific. Yet 
among the overspreading vines on one of the houses 
scores of sparrows roost night after night, let the weather 
be what it may. 
Again, in the Battery Park, near the elevated railroad 
terminus and the Staten Island ferry, is a clump of 
shrubbery.. Here at nightfall, with a tremendous chatter, 
as usual, there is another congregation of the little brown 
urchins, and when they have suited themselves with twigs 
(not often without a scrimmage) they go placidly to sleep, 
apparently regardless of the ceaseless roar of traffic and 
the glare of the electric lights. Pass there at any hour of 
the night and you will see them like so many little balls 
of feathers each upon his perch. If the weather should 
be particularly severe, as in a blizzard, they crowd to- 
gether till four or five may be seen in a row. That some 
of them do not survive the night there can, of course, be 
no question. Yet we never see a dead sparrow. How 
is it? Perhaps the cat_ could tell. 
It seems that there is a consensus of opinion among 
naturalists that P. domesticus is a nuisance, and that his 
introduction into this country was a mistake. Indeed, a 
most formidable indictment has been framed against him, 
and I fear it is only too true. But what are we going to 
do about it? I saw a short time ago in The Country 
Gentleman a most elaborate description of a machine to 
trap sparrows. I confess it only made me smile. We 
are all familiar with devices to trap or circumvent flies. 
