FOREST„AND STREAM. 
its appearance when it is mounted. Now bend the neck 
and head to the position you desire it to assume, and 
pull up and loosen all the feathers around the neck. 
Be especially careful not to have the neck too long or 
too stifif. The position of head, neck and legs is some- 
thing that you will have to decide on for yourself, and 
your success in giving your bird a lifelike attitude will 
ten something of how much attention you have paid to 
birds in nature. 
Your small birds you will probably mount on what 
is called a T stand; that is to say, an upright piece of 
wood fastened to a base, and with a cross-bar of wood 
at the top. This cross-bar should be, pierced by a brad- 
awl with two holes, the wires from the feet passed 
through them, and wound around the cross-bar. See 
that these holes are placed at proper distance apart. 
Your bird must not straddle; nor must his feet be too 
close together. 
For a bird that is to appear standing on the ground, 
as a sandpiper, quail or duck, the stand is a flat board, 
either with cleats nailed across either end, or a circular 
disc, more or less hollowed out beneath. The holes 
for the wires are pierced in this board. The purpose 
of the cleats or the hollowing of the circular^ disc is 
to lift the stand above the surface on which it rests, 
and to give the bottom an even bearing on the support- 
ing surface. If the wires touched the table or surface 
on which the stand rested, they would tip the board 
and the bird out of true. After the bird has been 
placed on its stand, although the feet, head and neck, 
and body of the bird may be well arranged, it still 
looks more or less dilapidated; all the feathers are 
rough, and the wings and tail hang down limp. You 
must go over the specimen with your forceps, your 
fingers, and perhaps a pin, moving the skin about until 
the feathers lie smoothly. You must remember that 
it is the skin beneath that makes the feathers look 
smooth or rough, as the case may be; that if you get 
the skin to lie properly, the feathers will be quite sure 
to lie smoothly; but that if you have got the skin 
twisted or stretched, or bunched up in any way, the 
feathers cannot appear well. 
THREAD-WOUND BIRD. 
After you have done the best you can, get ready to 
wire the tail. This usually seems very difficult to the 
beginner, and it is not always easy, but it is much the 
best means of holding the tail in place. Some people, 
without the requisite skill or knowledge, put a piece 
of pasteboard over, and one under the tail, and pinning 
these together, support them by a wire thrust beneath 
the tail into the body; but it is better to wire the tail. 
To do this a sharpened slender wire must be passed 
from side to side, through each one of the quills of 
the tail feathers— -close to the body and so under the 
tail coverts, where it will not show — and the feathers 
must be evenly arranged on the wire. If for any rea- 
son they do not lie just as they should, the wire can 
be bent. After the quills of the tail feathers have been 
wired, to support the wire and hold it in the proper 
place, another, somewhat stouter sharpened wire should 
be passed under it and thrust forward into the body. 
Only the wings now remain to be arranged. 
These must be lifted up and laid in position, pulled 
backward and forward until they lie smoothly and are 
properly covered by the feathers of the hind-neck, of 
the shoulders, and of the breast. The tendency is to 
set the wings too low; see that they lie well up on the 
body and well forward. When the position is right, 
thrust either a pin or a sharpened wire through the 
bend of the wing, and into the artificial body; and down 
just back of the leg, and under the wing, thrust an- 
other pin or sharpened wire into the body. Do this 
on both sides. These pins will support the wings and 
hold them in position. The pins must be in the right 
place, which you must discover for yourself, 
wound with thread. Make a loop in the end of the 
thread, and pass it over one of the wing wires, and 
then lightly over the back to another, and, with the 
stand on which the bird rests in your right hand, and 
your left hand holding the thread, so that it shall not 
press on the feathers, pass the thread backward and 
forward, over and under and around the specimen, 
catching on the dififerent wing wires, until you have 
the whole body and lower neck of the bird enmeshed m 
thread. These threads must nowhere press heavily on 
the feathers, must yet everywhere lie close to them and 
hold them in place and prevent any standing up or 
roughness which might follow on the drying and, per- 
haps, uneven shrinking of the skin. The purpose of 
the threads is to keep the feathers as they are, not to 
change their position. 
Now, when you have tied your label — which should 
never be omitted from any bird— to the stand, you may 
put the specimen up somewhere on a high shelf, where 
no one is likely to knock against it. It is customary 
to postpone putting the eyes in a mounted bird until 
it has dried. After it is dry it can be taken down, a 
little wad of moist cotton placed within each eye, 
and, when the eyelids have become damp and flexible, 
as they will in a very short time, they can be stretched 
a little, the eyes inserted, and the eyelids delicately 
pulled over them with a pin. Some taxidermists put 
a drop of glue or mucilage on the cotton where the eye 
is to rest, and there is certainly no harm in doing this. 
After the eyes are in place, and the eyelids have dried 
about them, see that there is no dust or tarnish on the 
glass of the eye, lightly rubbing it oft, if necessary, 
with a cloth. 
If you wish to have your bird in more natural sur- 
roundings than when he is on the T stand, you can 
easily secure a twig with a little fork, and when you 
have made a base for that, transfer the bird to it. 
There are books which tell of different methods for 
making rock work, and grass, and bushes, and snow 
work, and if you desire stands of this kind, such books 
should be purchased and studied. _ Hornaday's "Taxi- 
dermy and Zoological Collecting" is one of these, and 
Batty's "Taxidermy and Home Decoration" is another, 
less expensive, but by no means so thorough. 
The instructions already given are those for mount- 
ing a small bird, but the principal is the same whether 
the bird be large or small, and it is really only a 
difference in the size of the wires, and of the stand. 
To mount an eagle, or great blue heron, is hard work, 
and the bending of the large wires require some 
strength. But the mounting of a smaller bird, such as 
a quail or partridge, or a wild duck, is little more dif- 
ficult than the mounting of a robin, though the greater 
size of the bird makes it slightly more laborious. 
, ^ , Taxidermist, 
[to be continued.] 
Spook or Rats — Which? 
The Blackthorn, when I knew it, was a farmhouse. 
Formerly it had been a roadside tavern. It stood on 
what had once been an important thoroughfare across 
the AUeghenies; but the construction of a railroad 
running parallel with it but a few miles distant had 
superseded the old highway, and it was now but a 
common country road, and little ' traveled. The 
Blackthorn stood well up on the side of the range, in 
a very lonely, and especially in winter, a very dreary 
spot. No other house was in sight. There the winds 
seemed to moan across the waste fields and through 
the leafless trees all night, with a weird, mysterious, 
suggestive sound. What added to the general som- 
breness of the place, the house was said to be 
haunted. A peddler had been murdered there one 
night, and the tree was pointed out to me under which 
he was said to be buried. A census of the different 
peddlers that tradition reports to have been murdered 
in lonely houses in our back country in early times 
would be an interesting, if not a cheerful, compila- 
tion. 
My friend, John Cryder, lived in the old Black- 
thorn at the time I write of. He was a stalwart, mid- 
dle-aged man, a German, or of German descent. I 
had sometimes occasion to go into that neighborhood, 
and Cryder often pressed me to stop at his house. 
The family consisted of only himself, his wife and a 
half-grown adopted boy. I knew of the unsavory 
reputation of the house, and never having any han- 
kering for ghostly acquaintances, I had so far always 
managed to give the house a wide berth. But one 
winter afternoon found me in the neighborhood. 
Cr3'-der knew I was there. I could not get down to 
the railroad station, two or three miles away, without 
passing his door. To go by, after all his kind invita- 
tions, without stopping, would have been an unpar- 
donable oft"ense. I thought I would stop and get my 
supper, and then go on down to the railroad. But 
supper was a little late, and the darkness had set in 
early. The ground was covered with snow, it was cold 
and dark, there seemed no pressing need to go, and so 
it w'as plain that I was elected to stay all night. 
After supper, we sat and talked of various things., 
I had very skillfully, as I thought, succeeded in steer- 
ing the conversation clear of the dreaded subject; no 
reference to it had been made; and so, along about 
9 o'clock or so, an early hour anywhere else, but late 
enough in a lonely country house in midwinter, Cry- 
der remarked, "Well, I guess it's about bed time." 
"All right, John," said I, though I would much 
rather have sat up an hour longer, "any time will 
suit me." 
Thereupon he got a candle. As he was lighting it, 
he said, in a careless way enough, "Some people say 
the house is haunted, but I have lived here eleven 
years, and I have never seen anything worse than 
myself in it yet." 
This, I suppose, was meant to be reassuring; but it 
was far from reassuring me. I can argue very logic- 
ally against the physical possibility of ghostly mani- 
festations; but the earlier teachings of my mother's 
hired woman in my childhood, were stronger just *lien 
than all my later philosophy, and I felt nervous and 
demoralized. I wished Cryder hadn't mentioned the 
miserable thing. To his remark I made no reply, for 
I didn't wish to pursue the subject. So we went up- 
stairs. 
Now, that upstairs was itself not a cheerful or in- 
viting place. It consisted of only two rooms. There 
w^as no carpet on the floor. There were no blinds to 
the windows. No pictures hung against the wall. 
There was almost no furniture except beds. A board 
partition separated the two rooms; in it was a door- 
way, but no door. The stairs were boxed in below, 
but led directly up into the outer room, as through 
a trap door. At the head of this open stairway was a 
large heap of corn in the ear lying on the floor. In 
this room was a bed. In "the inner room, where I was 
to sleep, were two beds, in corners diagonally across 
from each other. If there is anything in the world 
that will make a bedroom seem more utterly lone- 
some than everything else it is to have an unoccupied 
bed in it. It was in this room that the murder was 
said to have been committed. ' The blood stain, not to 
be obliterated by soap and water, was said to be on 
the floor. I did not look for it. 
John Cryder set the candle on the table, said good- 
night, and went away. I resorted to every expedient 
I had ever heard of to get to sleep — counting thre 
sheep in a flock as they jumped over a wall, separating 
the black ones from the white and carrying the two 
totals together in my mind — this and other devices I 
tried — but it was long before I fell asleep. Some time 
during the night I was wakened by a slight noise, a 
series of low, dull knocks on the stairs in the ad- 
joining room; but it ceased shortly, when it seemed 
to have reached the bottom of the stairs; and after a 
little I fell asleep again. I wondered what had made 
the noise; but when I went down in the morning I 
found an ear of corn against the door at the foot of 
the stairs, and I supposed I had discovered the mys- 
tery. Rats had evidently rolled it there, and thus 
caused the noise. 
Down in the railroad village that forenoon I called 
at the house of a friend of mine. His wife was a 
bright young woman who had been brought up in 
the neighborhood. When I mentioned where I had 
stayed over night, she became interested. Had I 
heard or seen anything unusual there? The house 
was said to be haunted! 
"No," I replied. 
"People who had stayed there over night," she said, 
"reported that they had heard a mysterious noise on 
the stairs, as of something dropping from one step to 
the next." 
I was interested now. 
"Why," said I, "I did hear such a noise, but I found 
an ear of corn at the foot of the stairs, and I con- 
cluded that rats had rolled it there." 
"It may have been," she replied, "but people say 
that it is the head of the murdered man striking on 
the steps as they dragged him down stairs." 
I had been quite satisfied with my solution of the 
mystery; but this gave me food for thought. "People" 
had heard this same noise! Was there always a pile 
of unshelled corn on the floor? Did the rats roll an 
ear down the stairs every night in the year, or did they 
give this performance only when strangers were 
staying in the house? In short, was it a Spook or was 
it Rats? T. J. Chapman. 
The ResowtcefttI Skttnfc. 
It used to be said by the old farmers of New England, 
men who had, presumably, cultivated well their powers of 
observation, that a healthy young pig would drink double 
its own bulk of milk at one "sitting." I have never 
proved the truth, or otherwise, of this statement, which, 
on. its face, seems irreconcilable with mathematical veri- 
ties ; but I have demonstrated— to my own satisfaction, 
at least — thait, nature has made a certain other animal that 
can divest itself of more fluid than could be contained in 
a cubical space equal to that of the animal itself. 
When a youngster in my "teens," I set a trap one day 
on an Ohio hillside, near a trickling stream, at the m.outh 
of what I believed to be a mink tunnel. My theory was 
dispelled on the following morning when I found a bushy- 
tailed animal with a calico coat tugging vainly at the trap 
chain. 
The appearance of the snow round about the trap in- 
dicated that the animal had been indulging quite exten- 
sively in both offensive and defensive tactics prior to my 
arrival. In fact, it was this discovery that suggested my 
course of action. No sooner was my presence known to 
the prisoner, than he unlimbered for immediate opera- 
tions. Stiffening his brush into vertical rigidity, he 
trained his batteries full upon me, followed by a "swish" 
not unlike that of a rocket at the outset of its heavenward 
flight. His actual missile range did not exceed twelve or 
thirteen feet, but the odoriferous range seemed restricted 
only to atmospheric limits. The animal's battery was on 
the rapid-fire principle, the volleys reiterating in such 
close succession as to suggest a continuous performance. 
After a campaign of several minutes, the animal seemed 
to realize the futility of its onslaught, and gave the order 
to cease firing. By this time I had gotten interested, and 
determined to probe the capacity of the enemy's magazine. 
Hence I procured a slender white ash sprout, some twenty 
feet in length, acquired a position well to windward, and 
gave the animal a poke. The response was instantaneous 
and oft repeated. As I continued poking the pied shooter 
in limbo waxed mad and madder. With his anger in- 
creased the vigor of his broadsides, until the air between 
the opposing forces was constantly saturated with a green- 
ish vapor, which discolored the snow for a radius of fif- 
teen feet from the spouting nucleus. I would poke until 
my arms ached, and it was only when I desisted for a 
miomentary rest that the fragrant fountain ceased to play. 
It was always ready to resume when I did; in fact, it 
would anticipate me, and the slightest movement on my 
part would be greeted by a pungent volley. 
I did not time the duration of our skirmish, but it must 
have approximated an hour. I became fully convinced of 
the wholly inexhaustible nature of the animal's resources. 
1 was well assured in my own mind that the bulk of am- 
munition squirted in my direction must have exceeded 
that of its projector by some milliliters long ere we quit; 
and the- brute responded to my final poke quite as vigor- 
ously and copiously as to the initial jab. Is it a fact that 
this species of animal possesses powers of recuperation 
adequate to enable it to fully recoup simultaneous with 
an outlay? Samuel Mansfield Stone. 
