480 
FOREST ANlD STREAM. 
ijvUk it, i9B4. 
for everybody; the everlasting winds are the stokers and 
firemen, and they work without sweating, and never strike 
— but they strike hard. 
One day in particular I remember with a thrill of 
something that cannot be put into words. The wind was 
quartering and moderate; the hot sun from a blue sky 
shot down his burning rays, bathing the schooner in a 
flood of light; the decks were deserted, save the man at 
the wheel, who_ silently steered his course; the old man 
was below making up lost sleep; the mate had all hands 
in the hold all day washing her out, and all that long 
afternoon we sailed on with no sail in sight. Porpoises 
leaped in schools around the bows; flying fish rose in 
flocks from out of the sea, winged their rapid flight of a 
hundred yards, and dove with a splash into the foam; 
bunches of dark weed, which the sailors say comes from 
the bottom of the Gulf Stream, floated by in procession, 
and all the charm of the tropic seas was ours. The warm 
wind blew through the rigging, the deep blue of the 
water (we were off soundings) contrasted with the foam 
that broke under the bows ; the regular roll of the vessel 
added her rhythmic enchantment to the onward sweep; 
and from my perch in the fore crosstrccs I seemed 
to be alone and in absolute control of the fabric under me, 
as though it were a bicycle instead of a thousand-ton 
schooner. No dirty engines gave that ship life; the 
smoke, oil, heat and toil that they entail had no place 
there; but the sweet blowing wind, free and clear, did for 
us all we could ask, and at what speed was shown the 
next day when we held one of the southern coasting 
steamers, a twelve-knot boat, as the mate said, who had 
worked on her engines, from dawn till dark, when the 
wind lightened and she slowly drew ahead. 
This is the charm of seagoing — to cut loose conven- 
tional lines and rove at the will of the winds. 
One day at breakfast the mate said : "Mister, can I 
ask a favor of you? I want to get the hold finished up 
to-day, and if you will steer and let me have all hands 
down below I can do it all and have it over with." 
I was glad to assent, and that day, which was like all 
the others as to weather, I steered the schooner over the 
summer sea. S.W. by W. was the course, and I guess 
I made it good ; nobobdy knew whether I did or not ; one 
spoke either way would keep her straight and the sense 
of absolute control was fascinating. 
But night, made brilliant by the full moon, was be- 
witching; deck and spars, softened by the mild light, 
seemed almost unreal; the shadows lay deep where the 
light failed to strike, and over the whole there was an 
air of rom^ance which transformed that coal schooner 
into a stately galleon with a deckload of silver and gold 
sweeping on to the Fortunate Isles. The silent man at 
the wheel, the seething foam under the big spanker boom 
M'ide off over the quarter, the horizon, limited, save where 
the sparkling wake of the moon turned the water into 
molten silver ahead ; the warm air without a chill blowing 
damp and heavy from the Gulf, all conspired to arouse 
whatever of vagabond spirit one possessed. Such nights 
tempt one to roam the world around. 
Six days of this glorious weather sufficed for our 
passage. At noon on the last day we got a little change 
in the programme in the shape of a squall of wind and 
rain from the N.W., and clewed up topsails and staysails 
in a brisk shower and put two reefs in the spanker. 
"On this coast," said Capt. Merritt, "you never can 
tell what's coming at this time of year. This is the hur- 
ricane season, and if we got ketched out in this light 
vessel on a lee shore, the only thing to do would be to 
wait for high water, pick out a good soft spot on the 
beach, and run her up there." 
But all signs failed; the wind canted back to N.E., 
where it had held all the week, and we passed Martin's 
Industry at dark, picked up a pilot off the river, and 
with the moon lighting up the shores as bright as day, 
sailed up the blood red stream, and shortly after mid- 
night anchored off the Savannah wharves, five and one- 
half days from Boston. F. L. Eng. 
A Craftsman^s Lakeside Cottage. 
From The Artsman. 
If anyone can point to a rarer sport than building one's 
own house in the heart of an evergreen mountain region, 
and out of material hewed by ax or sawed by water- 
power at one's very door, I should like to know of it. 
How invigorating the tussle with fate (unforeseen cir- 
cumstance) and human inertia — the learning how few 
things are needed, ingenuity in devising substitutes, learn- 
ing self-reliance, how many things can be made by your- 
sdf, stripping the burdened nature of the superfluities of 
city life, coming down in hot solitary chopping days in 
the woods to four articles of clothing (hat, shirt, trousers 
and shoes) and the like! In the dry, bracing, resinous 
air how sharp the appetite; coarse food relished and city 
sops and slops and sweets unwished for and even 
scorned! ' _ . 
If you are only built so you can coolly and cautiously 
restrain yourself at first, well for you. I can't. I lose my 
head. I go to work with such unreasonable fury that I 
invariably overdo. It seems so contemptible and puny 
not to do as much as those big natives with corded 
muscle on their arms. Yet your cit, try as he may to play 
the man in muscular work, at his best can do no more 
than a boy. In building my cottage (with its ice-house 
and shop and verandas) I had to boat or raft every pound 
of material and furniture, from framework to teapot, for 
a distance of half a mile; for six weeks I chopped and 
hammered and sawed, rafted and rowed and waded; feet 
never dry once in all that time, except at night; hands 
stiff and calloused and hot ; face begrimed and black as 
an Indian's; clothes ragged; hair long; back aching; 
muscles overstrained. Yet, withal, I never was happier 
in my life, bating inability to sleep well. The fun and 
fascination of shingling, making doors and doorsteps, 
washstands, rustic trelliswork, dining table for porch, 
rustic stairway, kitchen table, spruce bark divan, and 
bed-lounge of spruce and rock maple sawed to order at 
the water-power mill; and picking up driftwood flotsam 
and jetsam; bass, salmon and trout fishing — oh, there's 
nothing like it ! Then the difficulties of getting seasoned 
lumber ; the long twenty-mile useless drive for a chimney 
builder; laying the chimney's foundation yourself; lib- 
erating your strangled pines; your mountain knapSack 
trips; the wild sweet bugles of the loons off on the lake; 
the plunge of the osprey for the fish; the uncanny laugh 
of the two bald eagles passing up and down every day; 
the deer in your very dooryard; the red fox you meet in 
the woods ; the night hawks pulling their guitar strings 
in the gloaming (at the upturn of their headlong plunge 
through the air) ; the divine chanting of the hermit- 
thrushes; the clear flutings of the white-throated spar- 
rows in the bosky pastures; and the unrivaled trill of the 
winter wren in latter June on the mountain sides; the 
very roadsides sweet with endless trailing arbutus, and 
the quiet woodland roads filled suddenly in the spring, 
as if by magic, with the red moccasin flower— all this set 
in a framework of color such as alone the mountain at- 
mosphere can show; the whole thirty-mile sweep of the 
distant violet range now drifted over by veils of white 
mist, and now (if in April or May) showing the long 
stripes of its snow gullies, and now stereoscopically near 
and distinct. There is something in this exhilarating 
piny mountain air that makes a man sing or whistle when 
in the open. But he and the birds make all the noise 
there is. The nearest steam whistle to my cottage is six- 
teen miles, though electric launches and noisy new cot- 
tages are getting too frequent and already profane the 
profound and restful silence of my peninsula. (Yet one 
can outwit the vacationists by going out of season.) 
I have spoken of the winter wren. It's of little avail 
to describe a bird's song by words; but if .1 can convince 
any who read this that it is sinning their mercies, as the 
Scots say, not to try to hear the song of this matchless 
little peri of the mountain sides, that will be something. 
This is not a bird for Mr. Whackbrair and his tail of 
pupil-imps. It would disappoint thfem. It is a bird for 
the devout lover of the primeval wildwood. Only the 
soul of the pious pagan, the lone mountain camper, will 
thrill to the high, plaintive-sweet, rapturous trill that 
closes the brief and simple warble of this bird — a creature 
rarely seen and difficult to see, a bodyless Ariel. voice 
(apparently), filling the mountain silences with pure 
aspiration, with a song like a prayer and that induces 
the religious feeling— haunts one for days. In the techni- 
cal execution it is the ecstatic upward-spiraling canary- 
trill at the close of the carol that so takes the hearer 
with awe and wonder. I thought of the highest, notes, 
the climax, of some fairy prima donna, and of the feeling 
I had as l listened to the passionate trill of the nightin- 
gales amid the splashing antique fountains, the roses, and 
the cypresses of the unique old mouldering Villa d'Este 
in Tivoli. 
Anyone can build a house in the woods. I know (by 
experience of prices) that I could put up with my own 
hands a ten by eight cabin, shingled on sides and roof, 
for twenty dollars. Portable houses can be bought at 
camping outfit shops in New York for eighty-two dollars, 
and corrugated iron somewhere in Connecticut for much 
less. Desirable land about me can be bought for two dol- 
lars to three hundred dollars an acre. Carpenter's labor 
here is one dollar and fifty cents a day ; good spruce lum- 
ber ten dollars a thousand; fir and hemlock cheaper; 
spruce shingles two dollars a thousand; eggs twelve to 
fifteen cents, butter eighteen cents; table-board, with 
room, three dollars, four dollars, and five dollars, etc. 
Building material is of course very high now, and cottages 
that cost one thousand dollars six years ago would now 
cost fifteen hundred dollars. But the point for an arts- 
man or craftsman is to save money by doing his own 
work and simplifying in everything. If you choose you 
can live in a tent till you get part of your house done — 
say what will be a detached kitchen or woodshed 
eventually — and then live in that until you finish the rest. 
Brick are high priced. A good brick fire*place and chim- 
ney running up through a story and a half house will cost 
you about thirty or thirty-five dollars. A native boat can 
be made to order for less than ten dollars in my neighbor- 
hood, which is in Maine, twenty-five miles east of Mount 
Washington. I merely mentiqn these prices as samples of 
prices everywhere in northern New England, away from 
fashionable resorts. I must not forget to add that on the 
shores of this "most beautiful lake in Maine" « local 
Arts and Crafts Society has for some years been estab- 
lished by a New York artist. Its chief work is the weav- 
ing of art rugs on the big native looms of the farm- 
houses. This neighborhood guild holds annual exhibi- 
tions. William Sloane Kennedy. 
— $ — 
Short Talks on Taxidermy. 
VI.— Mammal SfcJns, 
The man who travels in lands that are new to. him is 
certain to see in nature a vast number of beautiful ob- 
jects of which he knows neither the names, the habits, nor 
the uses. The mammals, the birds and the plants will, 
many of them, be strange to him, and about many of them 
he is filled with more or less wonder, and, if he has a 
companion who was familiar with them, aSks many ques- 
tions about them. There is no inquiry more often put by 
him who is going through a new land than the query, 
"What is that?" "Where does it live?" "What is it good 
for?" and this is likely to be followed by a comparison 
with some other natural objects that the speaker is more 
or less familiar with. 
Birds and flowers are much more obvious to the traveler 
than are the mammals. Many of these are nocturnal in 
habit, and though he_ may see their holes and their run- 
ways, and may sometimes have a glimpse of the creatures 
themselves, he does not often have the opportunity to 
view them deliberately, as he may the birds often and 
the flowers always. It is within a few years only that 
American naturalists have given close attention to any 
except the larger and more striking forms of mammalian 
Hfe. The buffalo, and many of the various deers and 
bears and other large animals, were long ago described, 
but until within twenty-five or thirty years ago 
there were a vast number of species of smaller mam- 
rnals, especially those belonging to the great order Roden- 
tta, that were quite unknown. Of recent years, however, 
a number of men have taken up the study of mammals, 
and great numbers of new species have been described, 
so that our mammalian fauna is now very well known. 
Not only IS this true of the mammals of the United States, 
but hardy explorers have penetrated into the far south, 
and overrun Mexico, and others have gone to the extreme 
north, and have studied, and are studying, the mammals, 
great and small, of the Arctic region. 
Big game is almost always shot with rifle, and most of 
the different forms are now well known, but the smaller 
mammals cannot be shot with a rifle, and the shotgun so 
mutilates their small bodies, and cuts up their delicate fur, 
that this weapon can hardly be used against them. Col- 
lectors of small mammals, therefore, commonly use traps. 
For creatures the size of the marten and the mink, the 
familiar deadfall, or the steel trap, may be used, but for 
the smaller ones, as rats, mice, voles, moles and shrews, 
traps such as are commonly used for domestic rats and 
mice are employed. These are sometimes baited with 
vegetable substances, such as meal ground from corn and 
oats, but they are likely to be quite as efficient when set 
m the animals' runways, or near the mouths of their 
burrows. 
These traps take up but little room, and are easily 
transported, and a dozen of them carried by anyone in- 
terested in the study of mammals will give him much 
pleasure, and may be of very great use to science in the 
capture of some species of mammal which has hitherto 
been unknown or rare. 
The implements used in collecting small mammals are 
precisely those required in making bird skins, except that 
wires are needed, and of course wire cutters and a file. 
If you are traveling in the field these things can be car- 
ried in a box similar to that already described for carry- 
ing your bird skins^ but it must be remembered that as 
such a box is traveling on the railway or jouncing about 
in a wagon, or being carried on the back of a pack animal. 
It will be necessary for you to pack the tray in which your 
skinning tools, poison, etc., are to be carried, so full that 
the different articles cannot move. Your paper and your 
cotton or tow will serve for this packing material. 
Unless you are really interested in this matter it is 
hardly worth while for you to carry with you on your 
journey this box and your skinning tools. Often you will 
get in at night, feeling too tired to make up your speci- 
mens,_ and yet, since you^ intend to start off early in the 
morning, the specimens must be made up or be thrown 
away. You should make up your mind that this work is 
worth doing, and worth doing well, and that it shall not 
be neglected. Better cut off an hour or two each day 
from your hunting than allow your specimens to go to 
waste. 
Even if you do not travel to out-of-the-way parts of the 
world, where strange and new forms of life are to be seen, 
you will find much of interest immediately about your 
home. Even the woods and swamps close to you con- 
tain a number of creatures which you have never seen, 
and which you never will see unless you make an effort to 
do so, and to capture and preserve them. They are all 
worth becoming acquainted with. 
Many collectors advise as a poison for small mammals 
a mixture of arsenic and alum, two parts of arsenic and 
one of alum. The arsenic poisons the skin, and keeps the 
insects from it, the alum shrinks it and makes the epi- 
dermis grasp each hair so firmly that it cannot escape. 
Two things are always to be remembered in collect- 
ing small mammals: one is to take the measurements in 
the flesh, the other is to invariably preserve unbroken the 
skull of each specimen, and so to label it that it can 
always be known as belonging to the skin from which it 
came. Some collectors even place the partly cleaned skull 
within the skin, surrounded by the stuffing, so that it can- 
not possibly get away. The measurements that you 
.should take are few; these are the length from nose to 
root of tail; the specimen should be stretched out and 
pulled perfectly straight on a flat surface— a board, table, 
or the cover of your skin box — then insert a pin in the 
board at its nose, and another at the root of the tail under 
the tail, and close to the body; another pin should be 
stuck in the board at the point where the vertebra of the 
tail ends. These three pins give you the two most im- 
portant measurements— the length of body and length of 
tail. Another is the length of the hind foot from the end 
of the longest toe on the foot to the heel. The color of 
the eyes and of the nose and of the feet, if naked, should 
be noted, or any other parts of the body naked or likely 
to change in drying. 
In opening the skin of a small mammal, the cut should 
be made from the lower breast or upper part of the belly 
down to the vent. The skin is taken off in the usual man- 
ner, the hind legs unjointed at the pelvis, and the fore- 
legs at the shoulder blade. The skin of the tail is stripped 
off by closing the finger nails of thumb and forefinger 
close around the bone of the tail and pulling backward. 
After the skin is removed from the body it is pulled for- 
ward, the neck skinned, the ears cut off close to the skull, 
the eyes carefully cut around so that the eyelids shall not 
be injured, and finally the lips are cut away close to the 
teeth, and the skin cut off at the nose. The feet must be 
skinned down well to the toe, and quite below any flesh, 
and if the animal is as large as a gray rat or a squirrel, 
it is well to make an incision in the soles of the feet, and 
to rub a little poison in them. All the flesh on the skin 
m.ust be removed, the lips split, and after all this is done 
the skin must be thoroughly poisoned. Now, from the 
skull remove all the flesh that is possible, taking care, 
however, not to break or cut any of the bones. Having 
thoroughly cleansed the skull and removed the brain, 
which must be done with water and a stick, put it to one 
side to dry. The skin should be now turned back, the 
bones of the legs lightly wrapped in cotton or tow, the 
lips sewed up. Now take a fine wire, put about it a very 
httle cotton, rub the cotton in the poison, and introduce 
this into the cavity from which the tail bone was re- 
moved. It should be pushed down slowly and carefully 
until it reaches the end of the tail, and there will be no 
trouble about doing this if you have wrapped the wire 
as it should have been wrapped. Do not stretch t'he tail. 
Be as careful as you were in the case of the bird about 
not stretching the skin of the mammal. Under the most 
favorable circumstances you will be pretty sure to stretch 
it somewhat, and so you must be careful not to fill it too 
full, and to give it an opportunity in the drying to shrink 
down to its natural size. The' made-up skin should be 
wrapped in cotton, the tail — unless it is a very long one — 
stretching out straight behind, and the front paws jtretch- 
ing forward on either side of the head, while the hind 
