blackened timber you shall see it by hundreds of square 
miles. Or, best of all, sleep beside me in a tent by Emerald 
Lake north of Field, and we will take a day's journey 
and see the Yo Ho Canon, and Takakkaw Fall taking its 
sheer, snow-white plunge a third of a mile, and look at 
glaciers around which the bighorn sheep browse, and 
everything sticks up on edge about a mile and a half. 
You will not see even one pair of shod canoe-poles in 
all your trip. Or if you want to try and crawl into the 
barrel of your gim, nothing is easier than to take you to 
another world of camping and angling waters, the great 
Shuswap Region, with Anesty, Seymour, Main Arm and 
Adams lakes and their streams, where mountains are 
nearly two miles high, and lakes often 1,200 feet deep. 
There you can get ititroduced into society — of the silver- 
tips, cinnamons and grizzlies, who will charge you on 
sight, and favor j^ou with a "swipe" you will remember 
if you survive. During eleven long summers of delight 
I saw all this, if I am a Sand Laker now. See them 
yourself ; I will get you a round-trip pass over the 
Canadian Pacific Railway, and you will come back asking, 
"Where is Maine, anyhow?" Or come and dine with me 
when I return to New York, and we will sneer at 
Sherry's menu, and agree it is not "in it" with the roasted 
fool-hen and fried trout in the woods where 
we don't wear white handcuffs and breast-plate 
shirt-fronts under white ties, nor make ourseh^es 
black grasshoppers in claAvhammer coats. And 
when you are old, join us in a tent on the 
little Slagle River in Michigan, probably the best 
home of wild, natural beaitty in all the world. And then 
I'll cr3' pcccavi if you also do not insist that a man who 
was well known not to be a canoeist, camper, angler or 
sportsman, was a fakir when he presumed to misadvise 
you that the feet of ail the young men are "turning" to 
his patch of "blackened timber" that he happened to see 
when some Maine sports:nen entertained him. and where 
he seems to have been visited by a counterfeit "heavenlj- 
nmse" that embalmed hi"i with a "divine afflatus" so he 
might steal your tent over your head, and make you sleep 
in starlight or rain and figbc mcsquitoes and gnats, make 
from it robes that, Dov/ie-like, he gets on wrong- 
side out and hind-side fo-emost, and then write a fake 
"poem" of "universal application." 
Then you will join me in pointing "the slow, unmoving 
finger of scorn,'"' and crying "Mountebank!" when such a 
man coolly asks you, "Do you know" some unlocated, 
swift stream where all the log-jams are "right-angled,'" 
and "bars"' are of "shingle?" 
I review this, for it is vital. Some years ago a man 
went to Brattleboro in Vermont, married there, made a 
visit or two to Maine, and was entertained by Maine 
sportsmen, as I am told. He had secured some notoriety 
as a writer of swashbuckler rhymes about soldier life in 
barracks, his work in that way being recently character- 
ized by the London Atheneum as "amazing intellectual 
vulgarit}'," "fitted for the music halls, or for exponents of 
cheap materialism, and philistine admirers." It was well 
understood that he was not a fisherman or woodsmau, 
cauoeist or camper. He was a literary hack, everything 
being grist that came to his mill. And he planned .i 
"grand" "poem" which the Maine folks should accept ns 
coming from a new Elijah, a High-priest of Nature at 
vdiose feet all sportsmen should sit in admiration. The 
possibilities of the wild and beautiful should be ex- 
liausted ; nothing shoidd be lacking in the spellbinding 
picture of the angler and his camp of beauty and grace. 
Mind, this "poem"'" was to be the record mark, superb, 
the very apotheosis and quintessence of the beauties and 
hypnotism of the joys of angling. And that is what his 
apologists call it in these column.s — ^that no picture known 
to them is so lovely, sweet, grand, vivid, and true ! 
He, an ignoramus of the camp, was to write for the de- 
lectation, instruction and joy of even the especial 
sportsmen and woodsmen who had made Nature's real 
beauty and grace a humble study for a life-time — for 
men who welcomed and searched for any one who could 
■write with the heart and eye of the beholder with knowl- 
edge about their loved domain. No Cagliostro of sport 
could safely sweep the harp-strings for them. They them- 
selves loved best to admire and worship with mute lips, 
and only talk of it all with their hearts, for they knew 
Nature should be studied rather than described by puny 
words. Over them always Avas the sense of impotence 
to tell of what they saw and felt. And when a passer-by, 
seeking his own glorification and cash profit, assumes to 
enter their temples and fill their forest cathedrals and dim 
aisles with false notes, they are not merely indignant, but 
furious. For all this is to them a sacred thing, almost 
their religion, as it is a reverent form of worship. They 
are jealous of this realm, and no vandal hand can be 
permitted to smirch it unchallenged. 
If this were not a sportsmen's paper, all that I have so 
far said would be omitted. The eight lines attacked are 
now quoted by me, I hope for the last time, for I am 
always pained to look at and feel their falsehood. But 
897 
first I repeat that Kipling was a fakir when he wrote 
them — that I claim him to have been a megaphone "word- 
artist" flinging a potful of language paint on a canvas, 
and demanding that real lovers and beholders of Nature's 
loveliness should admire his "splotteration." I am glad 
that Mr. R. W. Ashcroft, himself the editor for some 
years of a sporting magazine, and who has just returned 
from a long canoe-trip with two Indian guides iii the 
back wilderness of Ontario, has had the courage to face, 
single-handed, the storm of protest and apology. I in- 
dorse his every word, and thank him. As it is now 
claimed that the poem describes only conditions in Maine, 
his world-inquiry about canoe-poles, already fairly com- 
plete, iieed not be pursued further; and I have asked 
him, with thanks, to discontinue it. 
Here are the lines under discussion: 
"Do you know !lie blaclcened timber? Do you know that racing 
stream, 
With the raw, right-angled log-jam at the end; 
And the bar of sun-warmed shingle, where a man may bask and 
dream, 
To the click of shod canoe-polcs round the bend? 
it is there that we are going with our rods and reels and traces, 
To a silent, smoky Indian that we know; 
To a couch of new-pulled hemlock, with the starlight on our faces, 
For the Red Gods call us out, and we must go." 
In point of fact, this is applied to angling sportsmen 
and the camps of the entire world. Kipling puts it into 
his book, "Five Nations." As Newfoundlander states, he 
was ''not short-sighted enough to localise zvhat ivas meant 
for a universal picture." And mind, in the very title 
to the poem, Kipling says by implication that the feet of 
all the young men in the world are "turning" to his 
"right-angled" log-jams and "blackened timber," when 
nothing can be more manifest than that not one young 
man in a hundred has the spare time, and cash, and the 
inclination, to go into a camp. 
Now, take the false lines, one by one, and follow them ; 
"Do you know the blackened timber? Do you know that racing 
stream, 
In the three very first words, he uses one of his favorite 
tricks — m.ention of something he knows the reader can- 
not be supposed to know because it is not located, and 
vrhich it was his duty in fairness to locate; yet which 
he assumes credit to himself for knowing about while the 
reader does not. This is cheap "mystery." No poetic 
license can justify the placing of the reader in a condition 
of pre-arranged ignorance, and then impliedly placing 
one's self on a pedestal of superiority because the reader 
has not been informed of what the writer himself docs 
not disclose, but pretends to specify, knowing all the 
time that he does not. 
But a horrible, vitally offensive choice is made in the 
next three words. Note how the line-up of Kipling's 
apologists, basing their defense on the unimportant point 
of shod or itnshod canoe-poles, is swept away by the 
offensive display of quack environment for the angler in 
the words "^i^e blac^-'ied t^-'-'^^r i" ^h"" are vital, and 
E — LEAVING A TAMP — A LAST I WK AT THE SLAGLE KIVER. 
"Good-by, Sweetheart! Gcod-by!" 
"Ami fr*n> the stream I turned away. 
But h«ard it many an. after day."— Cl,AKE. 
