Forest and Stream 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1902, by Forbst and Stream Pubushing Co. 
Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. 
Six Months, $2. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST SO, 1902. 
VOL. LIX.-N0. 9. 
No. 346 Broadway, New York. 
A SUMMER SHOWER. 
The hot August sun shines brilliantly on shorn mea- 
dow, weed-grown pasture, and dusty yellow road, but the 
fleecy clouds which drift across the -sky make cool 
shadows, and a fresh breeze tosses the branches of the 
trees in the wood lot. It is hot in the sun, not with the 
moist heat commonly felt at the end of the summer ; rather 
with the dry warmth of the arid country, such as one feels 
among the mountains in Wyoming or New Mexico. 
Since it is August, and the hottest part of the day, the 
birds are quiet. Yet the pair of wood ducks hidden be- 
neath the shade of the alders at the head of the pond 
have energy enough to feed among the weeds and to sift 
the mud of the bottom through their bills. Not far. from 
thern in the shoal water of the margin stalks a little green 
heron, intent on the insects playing on the water's surface, 
or clinging to the stems of the grass. 
In the field above the pond, fall plowing is being done, and 
the bright share turns over a sod as dry and dusty below 
as it is parched on top. With 'loud monotonous shouts 
the farmer calls to the patient oxen, which toil along with 
slow^ sidewise motions, their tongues hanging from their 
mouths. 
Up from the western horizon drifts slowly a thin veil 
of cloud, which at last overshadows the whole heavens. 
The sun obscured, the breeze takes on an added coolness. 
Birds which have been hiding in the shade, emerge from 
their concealment and begin to move hither and thither. 
Robins and kingbirds fly to the wild cherry tree and 
pluck its fruit, their efforts shaking other berries from 
their stems, which other robins gather from the ground. 
Little yellow birds, brilliant still in spring plumage, show 
themselves on the trees, hunt for food along the branches 
or fly to the crowns of the thistles, from which the bird 
takes one of its names. The loud croaking call of the 
rain crow sounds from a great elm, chimney swifts and 
swallows begin to fly lower as the insect hordes they 
have been pursuing lower their flight, and long-winged 
nighthawks, which in loose companies have begun their 
migration, fly nearer to earth, so that the white' spots on 
their wings are plainly seen. 
The little wood ducks in the pond feel the coming 
change.- They dive and bathe, and go over their feathers, 
straightening and oiling each one; the heron stops feed- 
ing, stands erect, ruffles up his plumage and then smooths 
it out again, and stands motionless, looking like a stick 
projecting a foot above the water's surface. The farmer 
stops his oxen and gazes shrewdly at the sky, wondering 
whether this is to be a mere thunder shower which will 
pass, or a hard, continuous rain that will drive him from 
his work. 
Now the surface of the pond is dotted with a few 
circles where the rain drops are falling, and soon they 
come thickly. Immediately the whole aspect of the land- 
scape changes. When wet, the leaves of trees and brush 
change color, and so does the grass, whether it be the 
closely shaven -lawn by the house, or the meadow beyond 
from which the harvest has been taken, or one still further 
away, where grass and clover stand eight or ten inches 
high in a crop of rowen. 
By this time the farmer has driven his team under a 
spreading oak which shelters him from the rain. The 
birds delight in the shower, and hop about in tree and 
over grass as though they imagined that the moisture 
would instantly bring food to the surface. The rain 
patters noisily on the broad leaves of the trees or on the 
shingles of the house, and tiny rivulets run down from 
the roof, and gather- in little pools about the house 
corners. 
Suddenly, without warning, the rain ceases, and a mo- 
ment later the sun comes out. flooding the landscape 
Avith yellow light, and casting long shadows over a world 
gleaming and glistening with moisture. The , brilliancy 
lasts but for a few moments. Then again the clouds roll 
up, obscuring the sun and the rain begins to fall from a 
sky now darker than before. Slowly clambering up from 
the west are thunder heads, dull white and gray on their 
upper edges, but blacker below, and as these rise higher 
and higher and overspread the sky, mutterings of thunder 
are heard, at first low and distant, but gradually coming 
near and nearer, and flashes of lightning, too distant to be 
seen, distinctly, are visible from time to time. As the 
moments pass, the blackness grows- deeper, the rain falls 
more heavily, the thunder grows louder, the lightning 
fnore vivi4, gpoR tj^e storm is imTOediately ^boye us, and 
all around sounds the deep crashing of the heavenly 
artillery, while vivid flashes of lightning play in 
every direction. A few moments more and the storm 
has passed ; the lightning grows fainter, the thunder more 
distant. Toward the west the clouds break away, and 
once more the sun shines through and lightens up the re- 
freshed earth. The farmer drives back his team to the 
furrow and recommences his plowing, while the birds and 
the animals resume their search for food. 
FROM FINGERLING TO GIANT. 
The direct and pi'actical participation in sport afield 
and afloat is not necessarily the beginning and the end 
of its enjoyment. Indeed, there are many self-conscious 
philosophers, of marvelous acuteness of mind, who have 
learnedly and plausibly debated whether there is not more 
pleasure in the anticipation than in the realization of 
pleasure, with, however, the usual result in matters of 
speculative discursiveness; namely, that each disagreed 
entirely, or presented some nice distinctions opposed to 
his felloiAvs, and that each one considered his own argu- 
ments and conclusions as sound and final. 
Anticipation and realization are interdependent. They 
cannot be sharply differentiated, but in any case they do 
not constitute all the pleasures of the mind. There is 
another important phase of it in this connection, the 
pleasures of remembrance. Anticipation, realization and 
remembrance may be considered as making in sport the 
sura total of a complete whole. 
Anticipation has its place in the fairy land of the im- 
agiiiation, but remembrance is based on the actual experi- 
ences of the objective world. 
Nevertheless, in the exercise of their memories, men 
have an exceedingly variable capacity. Some have past 
events set in fields of flowers and song birds, while others 
have all events set in a bald desert of facts. 
In the pleasures of memory, he who has the most 
nimble imagination will have the greatest, groupings of 
detail stretching away from the clear present into the 
hazy past. Descending from the general to the particular, 
let us consider, for instance, the vivacious angler, whose 
m.ind is so accommodatingly elastic that it can compass 
both what will happen and what should have happened. 
Let us further consider that, about ten years ago, our 
angler friend, after an all-day whipping of a stream whose 
rugged banks were a teasing tangle of brush, boulder 
and forest, humbly plodded homeward in the evening 
shadows with a fingerling trout in his creel, the net result 
of fishy anticipation and reality. As he nears home, his 
heart grows heavier, his visage more somber, his feet 
more weary. He skulks betimes, as he shamefacedly 
anticipates an empty-handed meeting of friends from 
whom he had so cheerily and boastfully parted in the 
glories of the morning. Note now the compensations 
of remembrance. Failure was only of the moment; for 
as time passed, failure was mellowed and transformed 
into success. The fingerling grew progressively apace. 
At the end ofjhe first year it as a large fish justly bore 
first position in a fish story worthy of the telling and 
the hearing. At the end of five years, by a thousand 
recountals, the fingerling had grown .to be a veritable 
demon of a fish in pugnacity, resourcefulness and endur- 
ance as a fighter; a veritable leviathan among great fel- 
lows; a veritable event in the realism of memory, over- 
topping and overshadowing all others. How the water 
swirled ! How fiercely the fish jumped, circled, plunged, 
sulked, ran, glared! The fight was long, uncertain, ex- 
hausting. At last victory ! The fish was caught. Antici- 
pation was ended. Memory began. 
In the thousand tellings, the fingerling that was, is 
caught and caught again, progressively growing larger and 
larger, so that the one catching in fact gave birth to a 
thousand catchings in memory, each successively better 
and more exciting than its predecessors. The angler, if 
his imagination be of the proper order, does not merely 
tell his story, he lives it. The fingerling of the past is a 
really great fish of the present, as it would have been had 
It actually lived and grown with the passage of the years. 
But all anglers are not blessed with such memories 
If we concede the pleasures of anticipation, an im- 
aginary phase of the mind, why shall we not also concede 
the pleasures of retrospection which refers to actual fish 
as a beginning, with the same fish grown larger and larger 
as an ending? 
May not the long shots at game, the hair-breadth escapes 
from death in a thousand fierce forms, the enormous bags 
of game, etc., all have a useful place in memory for the 
recurrent happiness they bring in the realism of telling 
and acting the part ; or by making success of a failure ; or 
by exalting one's self innocently among one's fellows, and 
thus have a life-long pleasure for a few moments' dis- 
appointment? 
Nevertheless there are men who derive much pleasure 
from the actual occurrences of life, leaving anticipation 
and imagination to those who derive most pleasure from 
them, choosing the world of fact in preference to the 
world of fancy. 
THE CARP. 
The carp has been widely introduced into American 
waters, and for good or for evil it is here to stay. There 
is no necessity of saying that in numerous localities the 
complaints have been made that the fish is for one rea- 
son or another an unwelcomed factor in the fish supply. 
That it destroys the eggs of other fish, that it roots up the 
bottom and keeps the water muddy, destroys the vegeta- 
' tion and ruins ducking grounds, that it has no qualities as 
a game fish, nor any merits as a food fish ; that it is a 
spoil-sport, and a nuisance — these are some of the counts 
in the indictment. A typical complaint is that contained' 
in the last report of the Ontario Department of Fisheries, 
in which it is said : 
Carp is making great headway, and is becoming established 
almost everywhere, being no longer confined to international 
waters. It is increasing to an alarming extent in Lake Simcoe, 
and already hundreds of acres of rice fields in the vicinity of 
Holland River have been destroyed. All legitimate means of 
capture have been approved and encouraged by the department, 
but there seems to be no feasible means of exterminating it, or 
even checking its inroads. 
That there is another side of the question has been 
maintained strenuously, and it must be conceded con- 
vincingly by those who have made the economic value of 
the carp a study. We print as pertinent, because of re- 
newed recent interest in the subject, a debate on the carp, 
which formed part of the proceedings of the American 
Fisheries Society meeting of igoi ; and a reading of the 
facts and figures there contained is urged upon those who 
have believed nothing but ill of the carp. 
The suggestive report comes from the Adirondacks 
that Mr. William G. Rockefeller has purchased for $85,000 
6,000 acres of land comprising Meacham Lake, with the 
intention of adding the territory to his other holdings, to- 
be converted into a private park. The transaction is quite 
in line with the Vanderbilt buying of Lake Success on 
Long Island, to which we made allusion last week. The 
two incidents illustrate the growing tendency toward the 
acquirement for individtial holdings of mountain and 
water resorts which formerly have been accessible to the 
public. In the Long Island case the project involves the 
surrender of a public right of way which gives access 
to the lake for fishing and boating; in the Adirondack 
transfer the transaction was wholly between private own- 
ers, but nevertheless it means that a portion of the 
Adirondacks which has hitherto been open to visitors will 
now be closed. Fortunately there is a legal prohibition of 
the transfer of the Lake Success public right of way, and 
if the people of North Hempstead are vsrise in their day 
and generation they will not consent to any removal of the 
condition which assures to them their preserit rights. 
There is on the other hand nothing in the law to pre- 
vent the acquirement of private territory like the Meacham 
Lake tract; but in this case as in the other, the principle 
involved is contrary to public policy. The lakes and the 
woodlands should not all be closed to the people. Some 
way should be found for securing to the public the free- 
dom of what now are free, both for the present time and 
much more for the future. 
The note which Kelpie sends of the cloud which has 
come over the 1902 Camp of the Kingfishers, will be read 
with extreme regret by all who have in years past fol- 
lowed, the ever-entertaining chronicles which Mr. Hick- 
man has contributed to our columns. And all of courae 
must cherish the trust that there may yet be other camps in 
store for Kingfisher, or Old Hickory, as h|s cpi^irades 
affectionately call him, aiid Kelpie and the others pf 
band. 
