Forest and Stream. 
A W 
EEKLY Journal of the rvOD and 
Copyright, 1903, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
R 
G 
UN, 
Terms, f4 a Year. 10 Crs. a Copy. (_ 
Six Months, |S. 1 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1903 
j VOL. LXI.— No. S3. 
I No. 34C Broadway, New York. 
CONCERNING WOMAN'S WORRY. 
"And while yon are writing about worry," she sug- 
gested, "you might add that it is not confined to one sex. 
Men worry as weh as women." 
Wlncli we arc bound to concede, and would make due 
account of were we writing of the worry of the universe. 
Men do worry; and sometimes they appear to believe 
that if they did not worry and worry hard, everything 
would he at sixes-and-sevcns, and the world would come 
lo an end. But a subject so vast were wisely shunned. 
We have to do with woman's worry; in particular with 
that phase of anxiety in wb.ich so many dear women in- 
dulge themselves when their husbands or sons go off on 
lliosc absurd trips for fish and game. It is something 
which deserves recognition in Forest and Stream. For 
over thirty years there have been chronicled in these 
columns the experiences of the man of the rod and gun, 
his expeditions into far distant parts, his adventures, 
perils and hairbreadth 'scapes. But in all these yenrs no 
account has been made, or if any it has been but meagre 
and scanty, of that feminine solicitude, which, whether we 
are conscious of it or no, is a very real and constant and 
unfailing clement in our absences on our pleasure outings. 
It has attended us indeed through all our lives, having 
had its beginning as maternal anxiety at a time certainly 
not later than those summer days when with other boys 
of other anxious mothers we repaired to the old swim- 
ming hole, and reaching full development on the occasion 
of our first gun. Parenthetically be it noted, the making 
of many a good sportsman has been thwarted because of 
a mother's failure to endure with Spartan fortitude her 
boy's ordeal with his first gun; and many a man is to- 
day for no other reason than this deprived of the re- 
source of enjoyment in the field. Further in parentheses 
be it said, the second boy gunner in. a family gives less 
concern than did his elder brother. 
There is no disguising the fact that the conditions of 
a sportsman's life are in a peculiar degree favorable to 
the promotion of worry on the part of the folks at home, 
'in the first place, the notion of peril is inseparably asso- 
ciated with the use of firearms. I hen the hunter goes 
into the wilderness, into places of danger, perhaps far 
remote and beyond reach of aid in case of accident. 
Under these circumstances it is ciuite natural that 
solicitous fancy should conjure up all sorts of catastro- 
phics, from that of drowning from a canoe to being shot 
by mistake for game. Every report in the newspapers 
of a man killed for a moose stirs up anew dire appre- 
hension and fills the soul with forebodings of evil. 
'I'he capacity of worry, being largely individual, is 
in some cases so highly developed that the misery it 
causes is exceedingly great, even where there is no actual 
• ground for the anxieties that produce it. Some sports- 
men's wives make themselves so wretched by reason of 
their worry that one is tempted to speculate whether if 
the happiness and the unhappiness thus involved in an 
outing could be balanced one against the other, the 
wretchedness of the stay-at-home would not outweigh 
the wanderer's pleasure. Of such an extreme type an ex- 
ample is recorded in Mary Kingsley's biography of her 
falher : 
"1 confess," she writes, "in old days I used to con- 
template with a feeling of irritation the way in which 
my father used to reconcile and explain it to himself, 
that because he had a wife and family it was his dire 
and awful duty to go and hunt grizzly bears in a 
Red-Indian-infested district, and the like. I fancy now 
that I was wrong to have felt any irritation with him. 
It is undoubtedly true that he could have made more 
money had he settled down to an English practice as 
a physician: also undoubtedly true that he thoroughly 
enjoyed grizzly bear hunting and 'loved the bright eyes 
ol danger'; still, there was in him enough of the nat- 
ural man to give him the instinctive feeling- that the 
diuy of a father of a family was to go out hunting and 
fig-hting while his wife kept the home. 
"Bu1 I am fully convinced his taking this view of life 
really caused the illness which killed my mother. For 
months at a time she was kept in an unbroken strain 
of nen'ous anxiety about him. There were months when 
no letter came; then when one came it was merely 
retrospectively reassuring for the period behind its rather 
vague date, and usually indicated that he was forthwith 
going on somewhere else, where his chance of geltini^ 
killed was as good as ever. When he was in the South 
Seas she had a most anxious time of it. There would 
come a letter eloquently setting forth the dangers of 
coral reefs and cannibals; then silence; then a paragraph 
in some newspaper to the effect that a schooner, name 
unknown, had been wrecked on some South Sea reef or 
another (in the region where she knew he might be), and 
that the crew had been massacred and eaten by the 
natives. Of course having him in North America was no 
more restful for her. Letters froin him were necessarily 
scarce, and newspaper paragraphs not a bit more reassur- 
ing in tone, for they took the form of statements that 
the Sioux or some other redskin tribe were on the war- 
path. Indeed, the worst shock she ever had was when 
he was away in North America, llie last letter she 
had had from him informed her that Lord Dunraven and 
himself were going to join General Custer on an expedi- 
tion, when there came news of the complete massacre of 
General Custer and his force. A fearful period of anxietv 
followed, and then came a letter saying that providentially 
they had been prevented by bad weather from joining 
General Custer at all. These anxieties, although ground- 
less, were not good for so high-strung and sensitive a 
woman as my mother. No amount of experience in her 
husband's liabit of survi^'ing■ ever made her feel he was 
safe, and her mind was kept in one long nervous strain 
which robbed her of all pleasure in life outside the 
sphere of her home duty and the companionship of 
books.'' 
And all this misery was unjustified of the end. Her 
husband was not devoured by South Sea cannibals, nor 
scalped by red Indian Sioux. He died at the last in his 
own bed at home, "having passed away quieth^ in his 
sleep." 
That which may be said of worry in general is to be 
said also of this particular phase of woman's worry for 
her absent sportsman, that as a rule the evils concern- 
ing which one worries exist for the most part only in 
the perturbed imagination. It is, indeed, not an unusual 
trait of tlie feminine nature to indulge itself in melan- 
choly daydreams of affliction, to picture in sweetly sad 
reveries the grief which wcjld come with overwhelming- 
force if such and such things should happen, and such and 
such relatives or friends should meet disaster or death. 
To assume that this is exclusively a feminine failing- 
would, of course, be incorrect, but the truth perhaps 
is that woman is the more given to such self indulgence 
in fancied sorrow. 
The phenomenon is one which has been recognized from 
ancient times and has place in folk-lore stories, of whicli 
the variants are widely disseminated, showing thus the 
popular opinion of the foolishness and futility of bor- 
rowed trouble. Among the versions collected by Clous- 
ton, "a young husband had provided his house with a 
cradle in natural anticipation that such an interesting 
piece of furniture would be required in due time. In this 
he was disappointed, but the cradle stood in the kitchen 
all the same. One day he chanced to throw soniething 
into the empty cradle, upon which his wife, his mother, 
and his wife's mother set up loud lamentations, exclaim- 
ing: 'Oh, if he had been there, he had been killed!''' 
alluding to a potential son. In one of Grimm's House- 
hold Tales, Clever Elsie was sent to the cellar to draw 
beer, and seeing a pickax hanging on the wall exactly 
above her began to weep, and said: "if i get Hans, and 
we have a child, and he grows big, and we send him into 
the cellar here to draw beer^ then the pickax will fall 
on his head and kill him." As she was weeping over thj 
misfortune that lay before her, the maid came down to 
see what the matter was, and learning the cause wept 
with her; and then came the mother and the brother, 
and at last the father,- who all sat together crying because 
of Elsie's child — that Elsie might perhaps bring one 
into the world some daj', and that he might be killed by 
the pickax, if he should happen to be sitting beneath it 
drawing beer just at the very time when it fell down. 
In the Venetian story, as in numerous others, is given 
the same incident of the bride weeping in the cellar: 
"They were married, and when they were in the midst 
of their dinner, the wine gave out. The husband said. 
"There is no more wine!' The bride, to show that she 
was a good housekeeper, said : 'I will go and get soine.' 
She took the bottles and went to the cellar, turned the 
cock, and began to think; 'Suppose T should have a son, 
and we should call him Bastianelo, and he should die! 
Oh, how grieved I should be ! Oh, how grieved I should 
lie'' And thereupon she began to weep and weep; and 
meanwhile the wine was running all over the cellar. 
"When they saw that the bride did not return, the 
mother said : T will go and see what the matter is.' So 
she went into the cellar, and saw the bride, with the bot- 
tle in her hand, and weeping. 'What is the matter with 
you that you are weeping?' 'Ah, my mother, I was 
thinking that if I had a son, and should name him Bas- 
tianelo, and he should die, Oh, how I should grieve! Oh, 
how I should grieve !' The mother, too, began to weep, 
and weep; and meanwhile the wine was running over the 
cellar. 
"When the people at the table saw that no one brought 
the wine, the groom's father said, 'I will go and see 
what is the matter. Certainly something wrong has hap- 
pened lo the bride.' He went and saw the whole cellar 
full of wme, and the mother and bride weeping. 'W^hat 
is the matter?' he said; 'has anything wrong happened 
to you?' 'No,' said the bride; 'but I was thinking that 
if 1 had a son, and should call him Bastianelo, and he 
should die. Oh, how I should grieve ! Oh, how I should 
grieve I' Then, he, too, began to weep, and all three 
wept ; and meanwhile the wine was running over the 
cellar. 
"When the groom saw that neither the bride, nor the 
mother, nor the father, came back, he said : 'Now I will 
go and see what the matter is that no one returns.' He 
went into the cellar and saw all the wine running over the 
cellar. He hastened and stopped the cask, and then asked: 
'What is the matter that you are all weeping, and have 
let the wine run all over the cellar?' Then the bride 
said: T was thinking that if I had a son and called him 
riastianelo, and he should die. Oh, how I should grieve ! 
Oh, how 1 should grieve !' Then the groom said : 'You 
stupid fools ! Are you weeping at this and letting all the 
wine run into the cellar? Have you nothing else to think 
of? It shall never be said that I remained with you. 1 
will roam about the world, and until I find three fool.s 
greater than you, I will not return home.' " 
But let it not be thought that the citation of such old 
world tales is with intent to ridicule or make light of 
that woman's worrj^ to which in the beginning we de- 
clared we were to pay the tribute of our recognition. 
Count woman's worry a foible if we will, yet is it one for 
which we hold her more dear. The mother's anxiety 
which watched our comings and goings in the days of 
youthful sportsmanship has long since taken its place with 
the memories which grow more tender as the years go 
by. If it made slight impress on us then, there is no man 
of us all but is the better for the thought of it now. And 
as for the undue solicitude of those whose hearts now 
go with us, go we never so far in our wilderness wander- 
ings, this surely we may regard with indulgence. 
THE STATE DINING ROOM. 
When the White FIousc alterations were made this 
year so largely under the direction of President Roose- 
velt, it was to be expected that in the adoption of a new 
scheme of decoration for the State Dining Room, fitting 
place would be found for the representation of America's 
l>ig game animals. The room is finished in dark oak 
throughout, and the deep rich colors of the wood give 
an admirable background for the trophies. The heads 
hiavc been carefully chosen and arc typical specimens. 
Our illustrations show above the mantel of the west wall 
a moose head, and on either side a head of the mountain 
sheep. In the center of the ea.st wall is the large Alaskan 
moose head which was presented to President Roosevelt 
by residents of the Territory. On either side is a bear's 
head ; and on the same wall are a buffalo head and the 
caribou head which was presented by Senator Quay. In 
the. center of the north wall is an elk head, and on the 
sides are deer. The south wall bears one head of a moun- 
tain sheep and one of deer. When one looks upon the 
new State Dining Room thus adorned, his reflection is 
that no more appropriate scheme of decoration could have 
been chosen than this, which speaks so adequately of the 
great game resources which in pioneer days have con- 
tributed so much toward making possible the develop- 
ment of the continent. 
