SPRI.\G SPORTS WITH GT.\ AXD ROD. 
A new year of the sportsman’s pastimes has come, 
and the past year with all its adventures by flood and 
field, lives only in memory. Springtime, with its clear 
skies, its soft harmonies of bluebird, blackbird and rob- 
in-redbreast, its fragrant blossoms of ajiple and peach 
and pear-tree, and of syringa and lilac-bush, has now 
dawned upon us, and present!}^ will scatter their gifts 
broadcast over the land. The gunner and fisher are 
getting ready their weapons for the coming campaign. 
Guns are cleaned end prepared for service; fishing- 
tackle is overhauled, new lines and hooks and flies are 
procured; and powder-flask and shot-belt and car- 
tridges for the Parker breech-loader, are got ready for 
service. The fishing-boats and gunning-boats will soon 
be launched in the waters, and the busy yachtsmen, em- 
ulous for coming glory, will soon prepare for service, 
and the painter, the carpenter, the rigger and sail maker 
will very soon be at work, to repair and renovate the 
shapely craft. 
Th« trout fisher even now can be seen by the crystal- 
clear and ice-cold waters of the brook, raking the rough 
pebbled shallows, or flitting like a spirit from thicket to 
thicket, casting his silken tackle into ripple, eddy and 
sparkling fall beneath the dam. Soon will the blue- 
fisher be seen in his trim yacht, careening over open 
Sound, clearing the expanse of open bay, or skimming 
with wholesail breeze and straining sheet over the tum- 
bling hillocks of old ocean. He will ransack the wa- 
ters of Long Island Sound, the rippling tides of Plum- 
Gut and Gardiner’s Bay, or the far-spreading billows of 
the Great South Bay, receiving their tidal tributes 
through the great gates of Fire Island Inlet. The 
weak-fish, king-fish, .sheepshead, blue-fish, bass, black- 
fish, snap in baited hook at sea inlet or frothing estuary. 
The striped bass will presently flash out their burnished 
scales along the rocky reefs of Montauk, Gull Island, 
the Elizabeth Isles and the promontories of Long Island 
and Connecticut shores, and there the fisher will hasten 
to swing out his heavy rod and whistling line over the 
salt domains of the deep. 
In these spring months there is little use foi the gun, 
except with the English snipe-shooter, the br.y-snipe 
gunner and the wild-fowler who is in pursuit of geese, 
brant, broad-bill and the swarming myriads of the coots 
and alewives. 
The English snipe has not been very good on Long 
Island this season, and indeed we have never found 
them to be plentiful there. The best English snipe 
ground is the locality known as the “ Big Piece,” be- 
tween the counties of 3Iorris and Essex in New .Tirsey. 
The shooting there for snipe is excellent. The snipe- 
shooter will also find some good sport in Rockland 
county, and on the meadows at the head of Barnegat 
Bay, New .Jersey. But for first rate English snipe 
shooting, we know of no place equal to some boggy 
lands on the beach side of Currituck Sound, North 
Carolina. We have found them therein the month of 
October in swarming profusion, but, have never tried 
for them in spring. 
The shooting for Bay Snipe, such as willets, curlew, 
etc., in the spring flight is very unreliable in the South 
bays of Long Island, and along the .Jersey bays. You 
may find them there from the middle of April till the 
tenth of May, or you may not. If the prevailing winds 
shall have been fiomthe northeast, the birds will be 
headed off, and will be apt to turn into those bays in 
their northern migration; but they will reniun but a 
few days, departing the first fair wind and modemte 
weather. In some spring seasons we have found them 
very plentiful, but that is not usally thecr.se. The true 
and only time for the sport is from about the middle of 
July till October, and during that time good sport can 
be had at Shinnecock Bay, East Bay and Great South 
Bay, Long Island, and at almost every point along those 
shores. At the former place the best sport would be 
found at Quogue meadttws. Pond Quogue and at the 
inlet. Go to Tern’s River by mil, and a clipper bojit 
will take you to any good shooting, and the boatman 
can best advise where to go. You will do well at Billy 
Chadwick’s, or at Ordey’s above the Inlet, or get good 
quarters at the Inlet house, or at .Jemmy’s below the 
Inlet. But the very best place for summer bay snipe 
shooting we found at L. B. Taylor’s, Eastville, North- 
ampton county, Virginia. The sport there is capital, 
both for birds and fish; but there is some danger of 
fever and ague. In some seasons we have found it to 
be pterfectly healthy there, and others were compelled 
*0 resort to quinine. il. 
THE SPIRIT. IF \0T THE SI BSTAM E OF 
A Iir.ATER. 
BY ALASKA. 
Our John hails from Saxony, which land he left sev- 
eral years ago for his own good solely, and for the pos- 
itive benefit of the writer, for John is a model man 
about a country place, and as such he has faithfully 
served, and we can point with great satisfaction to the 
cumulative evidence of his ability as shown by his work 
all around about us. 
John has but two mental weaknesses, one of which is 
a species of affection that borders on mania, for firearms, 
and the other is manifested by a steady, tireless love 
for the accordenn on which he is sure to exert himself 
every evening after his chores are done for the day; his 
predilection for the former is not near so serious a mat- 
ter to us here at home, as is his indulgence in the latter, 
inasmuch as we already have three female m.mbers of 
our family who are all hammering music lessons, and 
when they have finished by evening, to have and hear 
John way back from his room strike up on his “wind 
jammer,” not at ail weakly, tinges a day, now and then 
not unfrequently with a little melancholy. 
John came to us shortly after his engagement, and as 
he exhibited a large navy revolver, aaid it was plain to 
him that the strawberry’ beds and cherry tree.s would 
just as likely as not be raided on by tramps from the 
city, but if we would give him permission to practice 
with the pistol up in the lane, he would fit him-self to 
repel any invasion, and thereupon “swore terribly in 
Flanders,” and quite overcome by the gravity of the 
cjise, leave was granted. 
We.l, the long and short of the matter is this, from 
the time John began with the above-mentioned weapon, 
we have had a regular soccession of monthly scares 
among the women. John’s room became a magazine 
and an armory; not one pistol but live, two shot-guns 
and a fulminating powder rifle lurked in his chamber, 
while the girl who made his bed was constantly shak- 
ing percussion caps, grains of powder, shot and wads 
out from the sheets and the coverlets, and was as con- 
stantly sayir g in tones f r her misiress to hear in the 
next room, that it was a.s miicb as her life was worth to 
go into John’s place, and therefore if the matter did not 
correct the matter she would leave, etc., and soon got 
rid of taking care of this charge by dropping a match 
into his spittoon one evening, which blew up with the 
force of a young earthquake, setting fire to Sally’s 
clothes and pulling an awful head on her. She left, 
and since then John ha-; retained his treasures by taking 
care himself alone of his room, and no woman of the 
household has or will venture to jmt her foot into it 
since the explosion. 
John fills little iieck mea.sures full of woodpeckers 
and cherry birds, and brings crows togrief by the bushel, 
when he has favorable days in the setison for these 
birds; he has become a terror to all the dogs in the 
neighborhood through the agency of the rifle aforesaid, 
for he says he will not have the evergreens despoiled; 
but this we have got to slop soon, or suffer the horrors 
of civil war, in addition to having all the cats from far 
and near settle here in alarming- numbers on account of 
the immolation of their traditional canine pels, i. e., if 
.John does not soon of his own free will and volition 
find good reason for shooting them also; it is most 
probable he will, because we will wickedly pron.pt him 
ourselves. 
In view of all this we have often ihonghi, and so 
must others, what a keen, happy sportsman our .John 
would have made could he have started in this life with 
but a modest ct.mpeience even, what a collection of 
breech-loading, revolving weapons he would have gath- 
ered around him in the course <.f his lifetime! what a 
show of stag hunting and trout fishing scenes would 
hang on the walls of his i.ome; wha; piles of shooting 
papers would accumulate, and what a jolly good fellow’ 
he would be anyhow ; but fate has cei taiuly decreed oth- 
erwise and has doomed him to labor with spade and hoe, 
in which occupation he must be all of the best years at 
least of his life, and though bursting with a hunter’s 
ambition, iie has neither time nor means to go farther 
in the bent of Jiis inclination than the length of the rope 
we have just measured; and there are many, many like 
him among the rest of us, who would be what they can- 
not, and in striving to be so, appear quite as comicall}’ 
as does our man John. 
Tiehinc on your own hook is well enough, only don’t cntch your 
book in tb« comer of yonr l»ft eyo. 
The Decay of Vermont Trout Brooks. 
To any one at all familiar with the natural ponds and ninnin? wa- 
ters of Vermont — its thousand mountain brooks fed by ten thou- 
sand never-failing sprini^ — brooks tributary for the most part to a 
few fine rivers who^e rocky or gravelly bottoms, larger and deeper 
pools, noisy rapids and quiet eddies were, doubtless once a favorite 
resort of the “lordly salmon'^ — neither the personal recollection of 
the oldest inhabitant or the testimony of older tradition would be 
needed to prove them to have been the natural home of the trout, or 
that they were once as full of this fine fish as the w’Uderncss waters 
of Maine or Xorthem New Hampshire are now. Indeed the fact 
that to-day in some of the oldest towns, in spite of every extermin- 
ating influence, it is possible for an expert fisherman to bring hom^ 
from bis day's ramble a well filled basket, is in itself a most signifi 
cant and suggestive fact both as regards what has been and what 
may be again under certain simple, entirely practicable and inex- 
pen-^ive conditions. It is a very common thing to bear an product- 
ive streams spoken of as having been “fished to death."’ In fact the 
general impression seems to be that the present barrenness of most 
old trout brooks is to be attributed almost entirely in many cases 
and Very largely in all, to excessive and Ul-timed fishing. No 
donbt this has been an important concurrent cause, but we think 
its part iu the depleting or exterminating work has been greatly 
overestimated. Given the brooks and streams as they very gener- 
ally were, even in the memory of many men uow living, in size, in 
sources, in the character of their beds and banks, in the number, 
adaptation and stability of the eddies, pools and little cascades in 
which they abounded, their unchanging feeding grounds and run- 
ways for the larger fish and safe nurseries for the young— and all the 
fishing that has ever been done, would still have left them amply 
stocked to day for all reasonable and legitimate purposes. 
But the axe of the wood chopper and lumberman has cleared the 
land, the spade of the ditcher has drained the swamps or the sun 
and wind baye dried them op, the old spawning beds have been cov- 
ered with sill or sawdust, gone to grass or been swept away; the 
nniform flow of water has been greatly reduced; the rains and melt- 
ing snows have made sudden floods which were impossible of old, 
and these have beta from time to time smoothing the ehannels, 
clcaniig them of the ancient windfalls, rolling away or burving up 
the boulders, breaking dowj the natural dams and cascades— in 
short changing for the w’or.«e the original characteristics of many 
streams all the way from their source? to their outlets. The beds of 
some small brooks which were once full of trout are now often 
nearly diy, while into others of a more abundant and constant flow, 
new and entirely worthless kinds of small fish have come in great 
numbers. 
It i.« true that in many parts of the State, as highways and by- 
ways that once ran through populous school districts, have been 
thrown up or are now little used, and the back farms, which they 
made accessible, have been gradually lapsing back through thestaee 
of shiep pa^tnre8 into something like their wild primitive condi- 
tion, a process has been going on, w’hich is likely to lead to the nat- 
ural replenishing of many brooks In fact such a result already ap- 
pears. together with a larger and more uniform volume of water in 
the case of many small brooks that have their run wall away from 
the main thoroughfares. While it is to be hoped that the ex- 
hausted waters of Vermont will not generally come to be restocked 
in this manner, it is at the same time a matter of soma satisfaction 
that there is even this one small bit of compensation attending the 
rneluncboly proce8<>. 
Hut the questioD is, what can be done to repopulate our streams 
by artificial means, and as pertinent to this we would venture to 
make one or two suggestions. Everybody is now supposed lobe 
familiar with the process of propagation— a method at once simple, 
incxiKjusive and exceedingly interesting. Of that w’e have nothing 
now to say. It is indeed absolutely necessary in but few cases 
(though of course desirable enough in all) to apply it to our streams 
Our suggestions have reference rather to the larger accommoda- 
tion and better protection of such fishes as remain, leaving it to 
them for the most part to do the rest of the work in their own 
normal and instinctive way. We have already spoken of the clear- 
ing out by natural decay and by floods, of those ancient windfalls, 
which, bridging the streams when the country was wild, came in 
time to dam the water, more or less, making small cascades, long 
pond-like pools and deep roomy holes such as are absolutely neces- 
sary to the growth ot latg^* trout. 
We would restore in so far as possible these old barriers, or rather 
we would construct similar ones along the water courses in those 
places where it could be done to the best advantage; someiimt s 
merely fel’ing trees into or across the beds of the brooks in a di^• 
criminating way, learing the filling np to lime and drift, and in 
<othcr cases completing the work with stones and brash. Here and 
there large open pools which have no shelter from the sun, or hid- 
ing places for fi-h, could easily be made inliabitable by rolling in 
from the bank a few boulders, or so p anting stones as to make a 
shelter. Doubtless there are al:ao^l everywhere for considerable 
distances sections of streams that are, for the pfseni at least, past 
being helped iu either of these ways withon*: too much tronble and 
expense— where, for instance, they flow through open, unsheltered 
grounds and sandy meadows. But somewhere, usually higher up, 
there arc generally plenty of chances. Indeed most of our brooks 
are at inten’als bordered by trees, and many of them for long dis- 
tances from their sources flowthrough woodlands. In such places 
plenty of admirable flsh ponds could be m'lde with no other imple- 
meui for the most pari th.in an axe, and tliat, two. without sensible 
loss or cost to anybody. Next, let those pools and eddies which are 
u.-Hslly found at the outlets of the smaller streams, and through 
which trout of all sizes are c^mtinually running as the spawning sea- 
son approaches, be served in the same way, or, at least, be partly 
filled or covered with brush, so that it shall be no longer possible 
for any unscrupulous fisherman to visit them from day to day with 
the moral certainty of capturing the last arrival. 
And lastly the spring runs and other places which are known as 
spawning grounds, and the nurseries of the young fry, should be so 
protected that they ctmnot at any lime be reached by the ho^ of 
the fisherman. Indeed so much faith have weju the protective virtues 
of b^n^b judjciou^ly placed, from time to time, thit we venture the 
assertion that a single ax cvigoruusly but wisely wielded for a day 
along the banks of an ordinary tront brook wonld do more for the 
protection, increase and growth of trout in that particular atream for 
