272 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Aug. 30, 1913. 
Published Weekly by the 
Forest and Stream Publishing Company, 
Charles Otis, President. 
W. G. Beecroft, Secretary. W. T. Gallagher, Treasurer. 
127 Franklin Street, New York. 
CORRESPONDENCE — Forest and Stream is the 
recognized medium of entertainment, instruction and in¬ 
formation between American sportsmen. The editors 
invite communications on the subjects to which its pages 
are devoted, but, of course, are not responsible for the 
views of correspondents. Anonymous communications 
cannot be regarded. 
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in advance of publication date. 
AMERICAN FISHERIES SOCIETY. 
In another column appears a notice of the 
annual meeting of the American Fisheries So¬ 
ciety. Here is an organization entitled to sup¬ 
port of every fisherman. The dues are only $2 
a year, and benefits innumerable. Mr. Angler, 
mail your little check for two dollars to George 
H. Graham, Secretary American Fisheries So¬ 
ciety, Springfield, Mass. It is a big work with 
small support, worthy and well qualified to have 
your co-operation. Give it. 
FRANCIS BURTON HARRISON. 
While strong men like Francis Burton 
Harrison are indispensable in the Legisla¬ 
ture in Washington, no finer man could have 
been appointed by President Wilson as Gover¬ 
nor-General of the Philippines. Keen, sympa¬ 
thetic, educated, a man of his word, always on 
the side of fair play, an ideal legislator, gives Mr. 
Harrison precisely the qualities needed as an insu¬ 
lar head. What Congress has lost the little yellow 
men have gained, and Congressman Harrison’s 
precept will make better men on the Archipelago. 
We congratulate President Wilson on his fore¬ 
sight and the Filipinos on their good fortune. 
Francis Burton Harrison is a sportsman, a 
reader of Forest and Stream, and a man among 
men. His success is most deserved. 
A BIRD IN THE HAT. 
Millinery interests—the bird killers’ trust— 
seems, through lack of interest on the part of 
American women and Washington politics, to 
have control of the imported feather situation. 
They work on the theory, financially practical to 
them at the present time, that a bird in the hat 
is worth ten in the bush. As legislators in Wash¬ 
ington refuse to hear the plea of the few in¬ 
dividuals working incessantly for the House pro¬ 
vision of the tariff bill prohibiting importation 
of bird plumage, let us appeal to the American 
woman, and let that appeal come from the men 
who subscribe for Forest and Stream. Let them 
put the proposition to their wives, sweethearts, 
sisters and to all of those that the feather trust 
is trying to drive into wearing a bird carcass in¬ 
stead of an equally decorative hat ornament. No 
woman—that is, no good, true woman, the kind 
of women we know — prefers a dead bird to a 
live one. Not any of these women would have 
one dead bird in the hat in preference to ten in 
the bush. Let’s talk to our women about the 
much-discussed clause in the agricultural bill. 
Suppose we make an agreement with suf¬ 
fragettes something like this; If they will give 
us one-tenth of their support, we will do our 
best for votes for women—a bird for a vote; 
that seems fair. If the 4,000,000 women who 
demand the vote will demand an artificial hat 
decoration, milliners will realize that a bird is 
rather a distasteful hat dressing, and that the 
American woman, of whom we all are so proud, 
prefers a bird in the bush to ten in the hat. 
DOES RACING ENCOURAGE GAMBLING? 
(From issue of Aug. 21, 1873.) 
This tendency of racing to encourage 
gambling and to promote the breed of blacklegs 
is a serious and growing objection, the most 
serious perhaps of all objections, to the sport 
of the Turf. But race-horses are not dice of 
necessity: and there is no necessary connection 
between horse-racing and gambling, because a 
bet is the touchstone of an Englishman’s sin¬ 
cerity, and as long as this is the case it is as 
hopeless to attempt to put down gambling by 
suppressing races as it would be to talk of 
arresting the sun by stopping our chronometers. 
It cannot be done. Parliament might interdict 
horse-racing to-morrow, and make it a penal 
offence to book a bet upon a race for a pair of 
gloves or a white hat. But gambling would still 
be carried on; and it is an open question even 
now whether more money does not change 
hands on the Stock Exchange in the course of 
a single fortnight in what are really and truly 
gambling transactions than changes hands at 
Tattersall’s, and on the race course of England, 
in a year. It is a foible of Englishmen, and all 
we can do is to make the best of it. Tattersall’s 
is not the only spot within the four seas where 
gambling is carried on. It penetrates the whole 
of our social and commercial life. It is the life 
and soul of much of our trade. The ironmasters 
of Staffordshire gamble in iron-warrants. The 
brokers and bankers of Liverpool gamble in 
cottonbales. The Manchester men gamble in 
gray shirtings. The merchants and brokers of 
Mark Lane gamble in corn. The shipowners of 
the Tyne and the northeastern ports gamble 
with their cargoes and crews. It is, in fact, 
hard to find anything in which some of us are 
not gambling more or less all through the year, 
from molasses to madollapans. The sports of 
the Turf are in themselves a healthy, manly, in¬ 
vigorating pastime; and the pastime, with 
steeplechasing, hunting, boat-racing, and the 
rest of our sports, has helped to make the 
national character what it is. An Englishman 
loves a horse as much as an Arab does. It is 
an instinct with us all. It is in the blood. You 
cannot eradicate it; and perhaps on the whole, 
it is hardly desirable to attempt to eradicate it; 
for people must have sport of some sort, and if 
they cannot have healthy and exhilarating 
sports, like those at Epsom and Newarket, they 
will take to something worse. Horse-racing is 
at least a humaner sport than bull-fighting. It 
is healthier than the cards and dice of the 
Italian and French casinos. It is pleasanter 
than the beer-bibbing customs of the Germans. 
The Turf has, and must have, its follies and its 
vices, like everything else; and when a race¬ 
horse is turned into dice on four legs, the 
sports of the Turf take a form which true 
sportsmen themselves must reprobate as well as 
the best of us. But to say, as- one of the 
severest of our satirists has said, that although 
the horse in itself is one of the noblest animals, 
it is the only animal which develops in its com¬ 
panion the worst traits of our nature, is to- do 
an injustice to the horse as well as to its rider; 
and if the observation were true, it would apply 
quite as much to the highest and noblest of our 
race as it does to the troop of blacklegs who 
are to be found on every race-course. 
[This is reprinted to show that forty years 
ago it was a question whether racing could be 
conducted without gambling. —Editor.] 
THAT FIRST MEAL. 
Unfeeling critics sometimes have found 
fault with writers of sporting sketches because 
of their proneness to chronicle their emotions 
on sitting down to the first meal in the woods, 
to expatiate on the savory qualities of the camp 
food, and to aver as a meritorious claim that 
the party “did full justice to” the cook, the 
cooking or the food. As we have pointed out, 
the secret of this is that one finds in the forest 
an appetite and a relish for food, which any 
sensible doctor would declare to be unerring 
indications of improved physical condition. A 
prominent authority opines that “the cost of 
living in the woods is not to be estimated by 
its cost at home. The fact is well established 
by experience that the consumption per head is 
at least double in the woods what it is outside.” 
And when a man finds in his camp a new 
stomach and a new palate, a new capacity and 
a new appreciation of food, why should he not 
be given the privilege of relating his good for¬ 
tune and putting it into permanent record as 
among those things worth while in going fishing 
and shooting? 
THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE 
SWORD, BUT— 
“The pen is mightier than the sword,” and 
then the shotgun and rifle and bowie knife and 
revolver. Armed with all of these, many a bold 
and courageous man would fail to “reduce to 
possession” the mighty and ferocious game he 
so comfortably and so expeditiously slays with 
his pen when he sits down in the shade to work 
up an animal story for a Sunday newspaper. 
Fireflies. 
BY PAUL BRANDRETH. 
A myriad little golden lamps 
Glance hither, yon and nigh, 
As flit the jocund fireflies 
Beneath the summer sky. 
Like motes from heaven’s nebula:, 
Like fairy starshine spun, 
Athwart the velvet, moonlit wood, 
They dip and flash and run. 
Each tiny flame, each glow-worm light, 
That glides through bough and leaf, 
Doth symbolize the soul of man, 
The doubt and the belief. 
For as the transient beam is quenched, 
Ere yet it floateth high, 
So, out of darkness burns again 
The spark that cannot die. 
