ai6 ^ * ' FOHESt ANt) STREAM. tOcr. 24,-1903. 
if he read Kipling's poem in the same careless manner; 
if so, possibly he might be excused for attempting to 
criticise the same. Mr. Hard}' said : "It can usually be 
heard from fifty to one hundred yards." Quite a differ- 
ence. Mr. Ashcroft also takes exception to hen-) lock 
boughs for bedding. Hemlock boughs are the proper 
thing, to my notion. In this description Mr. Ashcroft has 
Mr. Kipling done to a turn. In describing a tree trunk 
he saj's "anatomy of muscle beneath." Now, who ever 
heard of a tree trunk having muscle. Kipling would 
hardly dare so much. Mr. Ashcroft says "balderdash" 
at the idea of a sportsman sleeping "with the starlight 
on our faces." Easiest thing in the world. Cannot Mr. 
Ashcroft see any starlight from a shelter tent, for in- 
stance. DiXMONT. 
Uditor Forest and Stream: 
Mark Twain says that the difference between the right 
word and almost the right word is the difference betweei. 
lightning and the lightning bug. It is astonishing that 
there are so many men who do not know the difference 
between Kipling's thunderbolts and bugs. It is their own 
loss, but it brings to the rest of us a tinge of sadness. 
I have smelt wood smoke at twilight, and have heard 
the birch log burning, and am quick to read the voices 
of the night, and feel impelled to say that the words 
"raw" and "right-angled," applied to the description of a 
log-jam are so masterly in the stroke that if the Lord 
will let me find words like that for my own writings, 
critics may call me anything they please. No matter 
where Messrs. Brown and Asiicroft place their log-jams, 
mine occur at the end of a racing stream, or at a bend, or 
at any other point where the plunging logs are held up in 
their mad career in the foaming flood. 
The click of a siiod canoe-pole is so sharply character- 
istic of wilderness sounds that genius only could have 
guided the choice of that jewel for the literary .setting. 
It is a peculiar sound, with strange, weird carrying 
quality, and may be heard further than the ordinary 
human voice above the roar of the torrent. 
The bar of sun-warmed shingle is such a delightful 
place for basking and dreaming that many a man thrilled 
with the feeling that the Red Gods were calling him out 
when Kipling hurled his thoughts back from the work 
of the town. 
The Indians whom I employ are silent and smoky. I 
have been trying to think of any other two words that 
would give so comprehensive and true a description, and 
cannot find a single one. 
The couch of new pulled hemlock is particularly soft, 
fragrant and grateful, if carefully spread upon springy 
boughs of spruce, or, as my old guide, Caribou Charley, 
used to say, "on a bed boughed down with care." 
Another writer, in the September number of New 
Thought, apparently does not recognize the difference 
between thunderbolts and bugs. She misses the awful 
significance of Kipling's "Vampire," and, applying his 
words to "wives" proceeds to write tragically in the 
misery of her misconception. Robert T. Morris. 
New York, Oct. 19. 
Brewer, Me., Oct. t6. — Editor Forest and Stream: 
T inclose part of an article from the Boston Watchman. 
The writer is unknown to me. This shows that there are 
those who have seen "steel-shod poles" and been able to 
hear its "click." There are others who, "having eyes, see 
not, and having ears, hear not." Manly Hardy. 
The W atchman writer says : "There is a fascination 
about canoeing which is associated with no other mode 
of travel. The smooth and easy movement of the light 
craft has made it popular in city parks, but the poetry 
of canoeing is only learned on the streams and lakes of 
the wilderness, with the vast and solitary woods standing 
like sentinels on either hand, and the broad lake or 
smooth, dark, dead water, broken occasionally by a wild 
dash down a rapid or a strenuous struggle in poling up 
stream against a rapid current. The well-known stretches 
of well-kept hiwns are exchanged for the constant sur- 
prises of the quick turns of the stream, with the shy 
and graceful deer, after one startled glance, leaping for 
the shelter of the woods, waving their white 'flags' not in 
taken of surrender, but in saucy defiance. 
"Who that has ever heard it can forget the musical 
'clink' of the steel-shod pole in the hands of an expert 
canoeman, as, in rhythmic cadence, with graceful sweep of 
his strong arms, he forces his buoyant craft swiftly up a 
rocky stream against the rushing water? On a calm day 
you can hear it a mile away. Clear and bright, but not 
sliarp, it drops through the still and sunny air like dia- 
mond points of music." 
St. John's, Newfoundland, Oct. 15. — Editor Forest and 
Stream: I rise to indorse Mr. Hardy's sentiments on 
Kipling's verses quoted by Mr. L. F. Brown in your issue 
of September 26. Mr. Hardy's description is so appro- 
priate that I quote him verbatim, except a small substitu- 
tion of my own. He says: "I have been familiar with 
the scenes Mr. Kipling is describing, and I thought when 
first I read it, and still think the same, that there is no 
description in the English language which so vividly, 
briefly, and truthfully tells the story of logs and water." 
And he may truthfully have added of the spring freshet, 
ouananiche, sea trout and life in the woods generally. If 
Mr. Hardy would substitute Newfoundland instead pf 
Maine or Canada, I'll guarantee to get a cloud of wit- 
nesses to indorse his sentiments of Kipling's verses in 
every particular. I thought when first I read the poem 
of the "Feet of the Young Men" that Kipling must have 
meant particularly Newfoundland. Of course, it was a 
picture evolved out of his inner consciousness, enriched 
with the experiences and sympathies of a profound lover 
of nature, limned by a master with the "seeing eye" and 
the "gift of song." The line, 
"Where the sea trout's jumping crazy for the fly," 
is, to my own knowledge, the inost accurate and graphic 
description in the language of how sea trout act when 
they are "fresh run," and when you angle for them at the 
proper time and place. As for the "bar of sun-warmed 
shingle, where a man may bask and dream," I have dozens 
of times basked and dreamed, and boiled the kettle and 
smoked a pipe, a,Xi^ had a snooze on a sun-warmed 
shingle. ' „ _ 
If you ever arose at 2 130 in the morning to get to the 
falls for the morning's fishing — the hours before and after 
the dawn — and then whipped the river for a mile or two 
till 8 or 9 o'clock, with your basket full and your 
stomach empty; then when the sun mounted high as yoii 
began to feel the heat, and the flies and the hunger, you 
instinctively cast your eye around for the "sun-warmed 
shingle," and started the fire. With a good photographic 
instruinent, a painter's palette, a rhyming dictionary, and 
a select committee you might evolve a graphic and 
truthful picture, but in comparison with Kipling's epi- 
grammatic word painting it would be as "moonlight unto 
sunlight or as water unto wine." 
This poem was written by a man who loves nature, 
who sees it with a keener insight than the ayerage uned- 
ucated eye, who feels and throbs and thrills with its 
ever-varying phases, and who, above all, possesses the 
divine gift of "singing as he sees." Any sportsman at 
random can cull a line from the poem that will be a 
complete description in itself of any phase of shooting 
or fishing. 
With Mr. Hardy, "I would not like to make aity ani- 
madversions upon Mr. Brown's criticism" of Kipling's 
verses. It appears to hiin differently from Mr. Kipling 
or Mr. Hardy, but if Mr. Kipling had been short-sighted 
enough to localize what was meant for a universal pic- 
ture of what happens to a victim of spring fret, I'd say 
that he should have labeled it Newfoundland, and then 
there is "no question," as Mr. Hardy puts it, but he might 
have been passed summa cum laude on every point. 
Newfoundlander. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
I am full of gratitude, and ask your good leave to 
voice iny feelings. 
When I read, in the issue of Sept. 23, the retnarkable 
attack of Mr. L. F. Brown upon Kipling's "Red Gods" 
lines, I laid the paper down with a sigh. 
"Alas!" thought I, "thus do the fair dreams of our 
youth vanish away; thus are the pins ever being 
knocked from under our fondest illusions!" And I 
was sad, and would not be comforted. For, I had 
theretofore looked upon those lines as the ultimate 
expression of the call of the wild, which finds so wide 
a response among the readers of Fore.st and Stre.\m 
—as an inimitable word-picture of the wilderness of 
which I dream often, but may, alas! visit so seldom 
in the flesh. 
But no more was I to enjoy the lilt of that matchless 
description, to which I had responded so gladly, for 
was 1 not told — in print, too— that the lines were the 
work of a "quack of error," and many other things 
too horrible to repeat? And with details and cross 
references to boot. Egad! 
So for two weary weeks I was left to mourn and 
muse upon the emptiness of all human joys. Then 
came a ray of hope, piercing the dull gray clouds of 
despair. Mr. Hardy, who lives in Maine, the home of 
the racing stream, the log-jam and the canoe pole, told 
me some facts which made me think our dogmatic and 
analytical friend might not be infallible. 1 began to 
sit up and take notice again. And now comes Mr. 
Ames, with his summing up of the case on the evi- 
dence, and the restoration of my faith is complete. 
In vain does Mr. Ashcroft threaten to consider me 
ludicrous if I accept not as unanswerable the "criti- 
cism" of his friend, Mr. Brown. Reason has climbed 
back on her perch and resumed her sway, and I shall 
return to my first love, utterly disregarding the gen- 
tleman's foot-rule and square and eke liis microscope, 
which shows him not only the "texture of bark" of a 
tree, but, apparently at the same time, the "anatomy 
of muscle beneath." (And, by the way, isn't that last 
paragraph of Mr. Ashcroft's, on the qualities of error, 
rather a boomerang in the hands of one who is but 
fallible, as all men are?) 
I want to thank those gentlemen who have come to 
the rescue and restored to me a gem that was so near- 
ly swept away beyond recall by a torrent of words. 
It is true that I knew, through personal contact, of 
bars of shingle, bars of sand, as well as bars of "allu- 
vium earth-sediment," otherwise mud banks; so that 
portion of the "criticism" did not greatly disturb me. 
But, to my sorrow, I am not up on canoe poles and 
log-jams. Consider, then, my feelings when Mr. Brown 
solemnly proclaimed that no canoe pole, from Sand 
Lake, even unto the ends of the earth, ever was, or 
might, could, would or should be shod, and that log- 
jam was only another name for a rainbow, and, there- 
fore, a log-jam could not possibly contain any right 
angles, or angles of any sort, and would, of course, be 
inost inaptly described as "raw." What, then, was left 
for me but to abjure that poet and all his works, and 
thereby lose much that helped to brighten my journey 
through the vale? 
Now, let there be rejoicing! The facts and photo- 
graphs of Mr. Hardy have cleared up all these ques- 
tions. The word of a man who has seen and heard 
hundreds of shod canoe poles is convincing as to their 
existence as against the statement of one, or of many, 
who have not seen them. 
Fred. D. Biddle. 
Phil\delphia, Oct. 19. 
Editor Forest and Stream: 
Mr. C. H. Ames joins Mr. Hardy in denying the justice 
of Mr. Brown's scathing criticism of eight lines of Kio- 
Hng's "poem," "The Feet of the Young Men." Mr. Ames 
reminds us that the "poem" has "just been made available 
again in a new volume," "The Five Nations." He wants 
the issue broadened bj' the publication in these columns 
of the entire "unerring" "poem," so that his defense may 
not be confined to consideration of the eight lines criti- 
cised. Forest and Stream reminds him that copyright 
restrictions prevent this, Mr. Ames should know that 
Kipling has the reputation of refusing publication of any 
of his "poems" on which he cannot collect a royalty, 
even if it should be a free ad for him. 
I invite the two Maine letter-writers to read carefully 
the recent editorial criticism by the New York Evening 
Post of this very volume, "The Five Nations." These 
eight lines appear in that volume, which is merely a col- 
lectlOTl of miscellaneous verses on a number of subjects. 
As only the eight lines criticised are under consideration, 
I do not propose to enlarge the issue and claim an en- 
tire absence in this book of anything that could justify 
or excuse its pompous title; nor that this very "poem," 
"The Feet of the Young Men," could with equal truth and 
no more_ absurdity have been called their heads, hearts, 
toes or livers. Very few of our young men actually fish 
and hunt, as compared with the number of those who do 
not — ^more's the pity. In point of fact, not one young 
man in five hundred joins leisure and inclination to camp 
and use a canoe. Yet Kipling says, by inference, that all 
young men are "going" to camps in the woods. Nor can 
1 properly take up the balance of the "poem," line by line, 
and claim and demonstrate it to be further misdescription 
and misassumption of vague, unspecified, mystic "knowl- 
edge." For all this is not in issue here. 
A forest that has been ruined by fire is a pitiful, de- 
pressing spectacle. These New England gentlemen say, 
in substance, to the critic : "You write from Sand Lake, 
Michigan, so you are an ignoramus about camps and beds 
and canoes. You say you have never seen any blackened 
timber. Then you have never been in Maine." The 
critic said nothing of the kind. He said it would be diffi- 
cult to crowd into Kipling's eight lines of "poetry" more 
of misdescription. He challenges Kipling's "accurate" 
"sweet" choice of "blackened timber" (a nightmare spec- 
tacle and environment) as a place pre-eminently felicitous 
for a camping site — one to which sportsmen are irresist- 
ibly drawn, and affording an exquisite view especially 
adapted for "dreaming." And when he charges Kipling 
with trying to sit and "bask" on an impossible "bar of 
shingle," they ask if the critic "never heard of a sand- 
bar ?" This is all fog. Sand is not "shingle," nor is 
gravel of ordinary size. "Shingle" is a waste of small, 
water-worn stones that no stream ever threw up into a 
bar. The mixed sand, mud and dirt that alone can be 
coaxed by a stream into forming a bar, have been washed 
away from and have left the "shingle." 
In the eight lines under criticism, about the only cor- 
rect adjectives are "blackened" timber, "silent" Indian, 
and "racing" stream. To be in consonance with the other 
misdescription, these should have been "soot-charmed" 
timber, "fairy" Indian, and "bitter" stream. 
Mr. Hardy and Mr. Ames are manifestly mesmerized 
by the mystic halo with which their optics envelop Mr. 
Kipling, for they consider it sacrilegious to criticise any 
of his productions on account of the divinity hedging 
about him. Mr. Ames even lectures Forest and Stream 
for permitting a legitimate literary criticism. 
Both these gentlemen take what they consider to be 
the weakest statement by Mr. Brown, namely, that almost 
no real canoe-poles are shod, and when they are, their im- 
pact on the bottom of a stjeam several feet below the 
surface of the water cannot be heard "around the bend" 
of a noisy "racing" stream; and, after denying this, they 
argue that they have proved it to be error, so all the rest 
of the criticism must be error. 
No genuine sportsman, being poled up a stream, would 
submit to the annoyance of a "click" every few seconds 
that could be heard a hundred yards away, and that "tele- 
graphs like railroad iron," and would drive the fish away 
from his flies and scare away all game "long before the 
canoe comes in sight." 
Neither the Forest and Stream nor its readers care 
anything for sparring. They want facts. If Kipling was 
a mountebank and fakir blowing his own horn falsely 
when he wrote the eight lines criticised, they want to 
know it. So, as a matter of interest, a circular letter will 
be addressed to sportsmen who have used canoe poles 
in India, Norway, (some replies are already held as to 
these), Australia, Finland, Alaska, the Provinces of Brit- 
ish Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and 
Cape Breton, Newfoundland and Labrador, besides sev- 
eral points in the Upper Amazon Valley. The replies 
will be tabulated and submitted to you for publication 
without comment. This will be fact for your readers, not 
"Red Gods" nonsense. All this will, however, occupy 
several months' time. 
If this inquiry results in showing that Kipling was not 
a fakir when he wrote the nine words "to the click of 
shod canoe-poles round the bend," your readers will re- 
alize it. But that will not affect the correctness of the 
remainder of Mr. Brown's criticism. 
R. W. Ashcroft, 
New York, Oct. IT. 
— • — 
More Quail in Town. 
I WAS much interested in Mr. Carney's little sketch 
of the advent of a covey of quail to town. To hear the 
gathering call of the quail from the shade trees around 
one's residence certainly would make one feel that the 
game millennium had arrived when quail and sparrow 
would war for a living. One evening this week my 
boy came running to me breathless and excited, as I 
was enjoying the glint upon the horizon of the fast re- 
ceding sun. "Prairie chickens! Prairie chickens! Two 
of them just alighted in the weeds near the tennis 
court." I smiled and asked, "Are you sure they were 
chickens and not quail?" "No, too big for quail," and 
with that he started again for the weed encircled ten- 
nis court to kick them up. The birds had pitched for 
the night, and the boy did not succeed in routing them 
out. 
I cut short the following up of the subject as to 
whether they were chickens or quail by agreeing to 
allow the matter to rest until daylight, and let the 
birds settle it themselves. And sure enough, with the 
first rosy tinge on the horizon came the call that, when 
once heard, "can never be forgot" — the co-ee, co-ee 
of the calling quail. My boy was awakened in time to. 
hear the last note, and he exclaimed, "You were right, 
pa, they are quail." He, too, knows. And what a 
mental transferance to prairie, slough, stubble and 
woodland does the honk of the goose, the quack of the 
mallard and the call of the quail bring about! As the 
honking gander-led V high up in the heavens cleaves 
its way southward, the honk! honk! honk! coming to 
