Forest and Stream 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1904, bv Forest and Stream Publishing Co. , . 
rERMs' $4 A Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. ( NEW YORK SATURDAY, JANUARY 2, 1904. j No. JmIbroadwa;, New^York. 
Six Months, $2. ) ' ' • 
1904. 
With this first number of 1904 the Forest and Stream 
enters upon its sixty-second volume, and to all its readers, 
old and new, near and far, we extend sincere wishes for 
a Happy New Year. 
IT JUST HAPPENED SO. 
The assumption is that it happens so in every news- 
paper office, and in other offices, for that matter, and in 
: he world at large. A person is mentioned in conversa- 
•.un— he may be a. thousand miles away — and the same 
■'r the mail brings a letter from him, the first one per- 
;s for months. Did the approaching letter by some 
lilt influence prompt thought of its writer? No, for 
Alls name came up in a perfectly explicable way by sug- 
gestion, one thing leading to another and to reference to 
him. The only explanation is that it just happened so, 
land was a simple chance coincidence without mystery or 
Sraeaning. Doubtless if such things were noted every per- 
jSon could record a goodly list of similar occurrences 
'which just happened so. And the recurrence of such 
chance conjunctions would go far to make one skeptical 
of there being any more significance than that of pure 
chance, when he was gravely told that a Yankee ship 
captain in a South Sea port had seen his wife in a vision 
on a certain night, it being the same night, as he learned 
months afterward, in which she died. Marvel and specu- 
lation in such cases are saved if the theory be accepted 
ihat it just happened so. h 
When Mr. J. A. L. Waddell, of Kansas City, was in the 
office of the Forest anm) Stream the other day, he told 
of rainbow trout fishing in the Northwest, and of tin- 
difficulty experienced with the pack horses on the arduous 
'.-ail to the fishing grounds. It had been impracticable 
to do anything with the contrary and strenuous beasts 
without the application to them in copious supply of the 
strong language for such special purposes made and pro- 
vided. The ccr.versalion naturally turned to the use of 
profanity as an accessory of the pack driver's art. After- 
ward reference was made to a note which had been 
printed in these columns some months before relative to 
an address delivered by Mr. Waddell before the graduating 
class of a scientific school. The issue of the paper, 
July 25, 1903, was looked up, and it just happened so 
that in the column next to the note referring to Mr. 
Waddell was an article on the use and abuse of profanity- 
in driving pack horses. 
In the course of a desultory browsing among the book 
shelves the other night, there was picked up a scrapbook, 
m which, among other contents clipped from newspapers, 
was a collection of poems of heroism. One of the poems, 
which the reader stopped to read, was James Whitcomb 
Riley's "Had a Hare-Lip," describing how, when the 
bridge gave way at a great baptizing, hare-lip Joney had 
saved thirteen lives and sacrificed his own. 
Had a hare-lip— Joney did — 
Folks 'at filed apast all knowed it— 
I Them 'at used to smile looked sad. 
But ef he thought good er bad, 
He kep' still and never showed it; 
. :'. 'Druther have that mouth all pouted 
And split up, and like it wuz, 
Than the ones 'at laughed about it. 
^ Purty is as purty does ! 
It just happened so that the next book taken up was 
Lloyd's "Field Sports of the North of Europe," which 
opened to a chapter on hare shooting, and to a page on 
which it was related that after the killing of the hare "a 
singular operation was now performed; the head of the 
hare, with the exception of the ears, which remained 
attached to the skin, was severed with a knife from the 
b-jdy. The only reason I could ever hear alleged for this 
most strange custom, which is universally adopted 
throughout Sweden," Lloyd relates, "was that if a woman 
about to become a mother were to see the head of the 
animal, her offspring would inevitably have a hare-lip." 
In the evening paper the other night was a note saying 
that the name of the horse-chestnut was given because of 
the fact that at the point of the branch where the leaf 
stalk has fallen there is "a very perfect representation on 
the bark of a hor&eshoe, the nails being evenly and dis- 
tinctly marked on each side." 
The newspaper having been laid down. Canon Ella- 
combe's book, "In a Gloucestershire Garden," was taken 
up, and this was what confronted the eye : "One of the 
first trees to put on autumnal colors and to drop its leaves 
is the horse-chestnut ; in some seasons they take the color 
of old gold, and when they fall a curious horseshoe mark 
at the junction of the leaf with the branch is so dis- 
tinct that it is not surprising some should think the name 
of the tree was derived from that, with which, however, 
it has no connection." 
Trivial coincidences are noted with slight attention; 
it is only to those which appear to be of some moment 
that we attribute mystery and an occult nature. New 
York has recently witnessed a gathering of people from 
all over the country, who claim to be descendants and 
heirs of the original proprietors of that part of the city 
comprised in the old town of Flarlem. They believe that 
they have a claim to this immense tract of land and build- 
ings now in other hands, and they are led by a man who 
assured the convention that in undertaking the reclama- 
tion of the property and establishing upon it a New 
Jerusalem he had been guided by the admonition con- 
tained in a Bible text upon which his eye had fallen when 
the book was opened at random. His faith in the divine 
call thus revealed to him was so sincere that he has 
sacrificed his business, time, and means to devote all^ his 
time to the work. Since, then, however, he has decided 
that though "convinced that the recovery of the Harlem 
rights and properties was the fulfilment of prophecy, I 
freely admit that I must be mistaken in my scriptural 
interpretation of the subject;" in other words, he has 
come to the sensible conclusion with respect to this ran- 
(!f)ni rea ding of a Bible text, that "it just happened so." 
And it further just happens so that as this is sent to 
I he printer a letter comes from Mr. Fayette Durlin, of 
.Madison, Wis., who writes : 
I have been intending to drop you a line ever since the 
Christmas number of Forest and Stream arrived, to tell you 
liow much I appreciated and enjoyed this number. You certainly 
outdid yourself in this particular instance, and I am sure that it 
will more firmly establish the fact that Forest and Stream is 
without doubt the best sporting publication in circulation. I 
noticed a peculiar coincidence in regard to the anecdote about 
the "Venerable Men" in the article on Daniel Webster. The 
Christmas number of the Saturday Evening Post contained a paper 
l,y Grover Cleveland, in which he referred to this same anecdote, 
and also to the great Daniel's love for the Mashpee. 
-■ A CONNECTICUT WINTER WALK. 
The mercury stood below zero just before daylight, 
and in the dull sky no fading stars were to be seen. Keen 
and bitter as was the cold, the air was still. After it 
grew light the intense cold, congealing the moisture in 
the atmosphere, began to sift it down in light fine snow, 
which, as the moments passed, fell more and more 
thickly, until it was hard to see across the home lot from 
the house to the gate. One looked out on a white world. 
Warm and cheery as it was within the house, strings 
were tugging toward out of doors, and before the morn- 
ing had half passed, the feathery whiteness of the undis- 
turbed snow was broken by a trail leading from the 
house. Though the snow lay deep, it was so light that 
walking was not laborious; and, though the cold was 
sharp, rapid exercise made the blood course swiftly 
through the veins. Down in the "run" all was white save 
where the gray stems of alder, or the thicker, trunk of 
swamp maple rose above the snow, and standing by the 
brookside the ripple of the water as it poured over stones 
and tinkled against the shell ice was heard beneath the 
white covering. 
The weeds stand high in the old corn lot beyond, but 
a multitude of migrants have long ago stripped them of 
seeds, and not a bird was visible until the border of the 
woods was reached. Then, from a bunch of ragweed a 
white-throated sparrow sprang into the air, paused for a 
moment on an alder twig, and plunged deep into the 
woods. 
Half a mile of winding walk through the for^t showed 
nothing alive. The swamps were frozen, yet here and 
there some warm spring below had melted a hollow in 
the icy covering, so that it broke easily with a resounding 
crash. At the end of the woods the rolling lots were 
white with only here and there a black cedar to interrupt 
the view. The whid had risen now, sno>Y flakes y^&x^ fall- 
ing thicker than ever, and whirling about in the fashion 
of a true western blizzard. Along the road song sparrows 
and j uncos were hiding from the storm among the 
tangled cat briers and blackberry vines, and when dis- 
turbed tossed themselves into the air and were whirled 
away to some other nook where comfort might be found. 
In another strip of woods the winter chopper had been 
at work, and great chestnuts and white barked beeches lay 
prostrate on the ground, partly cut up now into neatly 
piled cord wood. On the hillside at the border of the 
wood the wann spring, open even in this sharp cold, looked 
dark and deep, and somewhere down below a multitude 
of frogs were sleeping in its oozy bottom. From the 
undulating meadow which crowns the hill, dotted with 
conical cedars, with great erratic boulders and a few 
gnarled and twisted apple trees, sprang a single meadow 
lark, which, helpless in the wind, after a short flight threw 
himself down behind a stone wall. 
Beyond the hill Blowaway, a narrow forest-bordered 
lane, had been chosen as shelter by a multitude of juncos 
and tree sparrows, and even by crows, which, wise birds 
though they are, did not suspect that human beings 
would be abroad on such a day, and sat in fancied 
security, to rise at last but ten or twelve feet away, in 
huge blackness against the universal white. 
Up among the cedars where thick woods and the 
ravines of the rocky hill gave shelter from the wind, a 
jay was seen, and here only a moment or two before a 
fox had passed along, hunting his breakfast late this 
morning, since the impression of his round feet had 
hardly begun to. be covered by the thick falling snow. 
The hill crossed, there were other fields, and down near 
the lily pond a dozen bluebirds were started from their 
hiding places among the sumacs. Just beyond then! a 
rabbit had crossed the lot, and a little further on a gray 
squirrel had ventured out, daring to face snow and cold 
for a bit of breakfast. 
The wind which had been blowing harder and harder had 
now shaken from the boughs of evergreen and deciduous 
tree alike the light snow that had wreathed them during 
early morning, yet the close set needles of the cedar held 
so much of this that near at hand they seemed gray in- 
stead of dark green. 
The bitter cold had closed all open waters save here 
and there a warm spring from which run swift flowing 
brooks, and in these warm waters ducks might have been 
seen not a few. But this is the hard time of the year, 
and each one of nature's creatures has now to strive; 
busily to procure food to support life. Why^ then, in 
these rigorous climes, should man strive to make exist- 
ence harder for them? 
The wide circle of the Forest and Stream readers, and 
their extremely varied pursuits, make easy the dissemina- 
tion of information of unusual interest to all outdoor peo- 
ple; and letters published constantly call forth unexpected 
responses. The last case which comes to our attention 
is Mr. Emerson Carney's interesting note on "Back-Trail- 
ing Horses." Among those readers whose memories were 
stirred by this, and who gave some expr,ession to their 
feelings, were an old plainsman, a young woman resi- 
dent in a large city, an old Texas cavalry man of long 
experience, and a native of Flanders now resident in the 
United States. To each of these Mr. Carney's note ap- 
pealed with a force so strong that each had something to 
say on the subject to the other readers of the paper, and 
no doubt there were many others who had something te 
say but did not come to the point of writing it out. This 
is one of the pleasantest and most useful functions of the 
Forest and Stream ; that it should serve as a medium of 
exchange among its readers of experiences, pleasant 
memories and useful information. Each reader of the 
paper has some bit of knowledge not shared by all the 
other readers. He should go out of his way to share this 
with the others. 
In the November 18 issue of the Agricultural Reporter 
of Barbados, is a report of a meeting of the Legislative 
Council of the island, at which it was resolved to offer a 
bounty for the destruction of the mongoose. Other West 
India islands have had their sad experience with this 
animal, which it may be hoped will never reach these 
shores. The experiment of the United States with the 
English sparrow has, we trust, taught us a less<ji^, ^ 
