Oct. 25, 1913. 
FOREST AND STREAM 
523 
thing moves by the big bell that jangles at the 
entrance, from the time of arousing the monks 
to low mass in the early morning to the final 
curfew for evening prayer. At the 7 o’clock 
morning bell the whole herd of St. Bernard 
dogs break loose, and the racket reverbera:es 
throughout the dungeon corridors. The per¬ 
fumery of the Hospice is not as sweet as the 
extracts manufactured in Paris. I believe if 
those good St. Bernard monks would only spend 
a few hours reading books on sanitary science, 
they would make their hospitable monastery more 
attractive, but nevertheless a night spent there 
is ever remembered as an object lesson of how 
people in a measure lived several hundred years 
ago. 
At 9:30 the next morning a new driver ap¬ 
peared with a single horse and victoria to take 
us to the town of Aosta, Italy, from which place 
he had started at daybreak. The descent from 
the Hospice into the Aosta valley of Italy is 
like a journey into paradise, and between the 
enchanting vistas which we get all the way down 
we again admire the road builders of the Alps 
who builded these highways with such painstak¬ 
ing care than though slightly repaired and almost 
forgotten to-day are found to be in such splen¬ 
did condition. The lines of stone guard-posts 
alone are enough to make an American marvel 
when he considers that America with her high 
rate of wages, posts of stone for road guards, 
would be considered out of the question, and 
our shaky, bumpy and often dangerous moun¬ 
tain roads are considered very well side-guarded 
if they have as much as a wooden fence. 
Our Aosta driver was not as much interested 
in the charming scenery of the Aosta valley as 
he was to get his passengers to Aosta in time 
to catch the 12:10 p. m. train, which he did. 
Though we had taken a day and a half and gone 
out of the accustomed beat of travel to traverse 
a mountain range which we could have gone 
under by train in a few hours, we regretted 
that the grand drive was over and we would 
be ready to take more time in repeating the 
journey. 
The scenery, the novelty, the attractiveness 
of the Alps and their people are too fascinating 
to pass by hurriedly, and those who like to see 
a country that they travel through will regret 
to hear that an effort is to be made to widen the 
Bernard pass and open it to motor cars. At 
present a horseless vehicle is fined $200 if it 
attempts to drive over the pass, and how much 
better would it be to keep the pass forever free 
from motor cars and revive the old coaching 
days with the Swiss five horse diligence, its 
jingling bells and crack Alpine drivers. 
But the spirit of the age is rush, and even 
Switzerland is stooping to the headlong speed 
spirit when that country widens and opens the 
pass of the St. Bernard to the motor driven 
vehicle. With the shriek of the mechanical auto¬ 
mobile, the death knell of romance will be 
sounded on the glorious mountain pass of the 
Great St. Bernard. 
Duck Shooting in the Fog 
W HEN you want to go duck shooting, get 
next to the man who owns a motor boat. 
I’ve been “next.” When a man’s shut 
up in an office for weeks, chasing the elusive 
astigmatism (I’m a glim artist), the longing for 
a little shooting trip on the salt water becomes 
so keen that you can fairly taste it, so remem¬ 
bering my friend Mayland, I locked my door the 
other afternoon, and by divers ways and side 
streets, stalked his house. I displayed a good 
deal of caution, for I didn’t know just how his 
wife stood on the shooting question, but I figured 
that if I could get him alone, I might entice him 
away for a morning. 
I found him in the back yard, skinning a 
hell-diver, and from the look in his eye when I 
said “Coots” I knew I had him. So that night 
I went to sleep with the alarm clock ticking 
merrily in my ear, the indicator pointing at 4 
o’clock. There’s no particular hurry about get¬ 
ting up early nowadays; can't shoot until sun¬ 
rise, you know. 
Promptly on the hour I jumped out of bed, 
and my wife, who by the way is a good sport, 
insisted on getting me some breakfast. My side 
of the house didn’t object in the least, so we 
had a little lunch together in the early morning 
hours. As luck would have it, I found the whole 
outdoors enveloped in a heavy blanket of fog. 
The air was full of it. It dripped from the 
eaves, and it dampened my ardor considerably. 
Did you ever go duck shooting in the fog? It’s 
out of sight. 
Giving my pump gun a good coat of “Three 
in One”—I always keep it in a bottle marked 
By FRANK L. BAILEY 
“Vanilla” so I will know what it is—I set my 
course for the Plymouth Y. C. wharf, the ap¬ 
pointed rendezvous, and found Mayland waiting 
for me. It was then 5 o’clock, and so dark you 
could scarcely see your hand before you. After 
waiting for daylight, and the fog to lift, we de¬ 
cided to get my spirit compass and start. If 
anything, the fog grew thicker as dawn ap¬ 
proached, but we weren’t going to be cheated 
out of the trip, so Mayland cranked the engine, 
and at 7 o’clock we pointed her nose out into the 
harbor, and began our seven miles’ run in the 
fog. 
Seven-thirty found us feeling our way cau¬ 
tiously up along the eastern Plymouth shore, 
stearing clear of shoal water (we struck once), 
and at 8 o’clock, when it seemed we had run for 
hours, we found ourselves—I don’t know where. 
Mayland thought we’d better stop, so we tied 
up to a lobster trap buoy and waited. After a 
moment we heard the song of birds, and as the 
fog lifted, momentarily, we sighted two round 
boulders, looming up from the water, about a 
gunshot to the left. “Rocky Point,” commented 
Mayland, “our exact destination.” It was still 
thick, so we decided not to put the decoys over 
for a while. 
Occasionally we heard the whistle of coots 
as they winged their way past, but we saw noth¬ 
ing. The sun for a long time had been battling 
for supremacy, and presently it nosed its way 
through the white mists, and cleared a circle 
around us for about forty yards or so. Then 
a gun went off to the southward, and soon they 
were peppering away all around us. The whistle 
of coots became more frequent, and one flock 
of butterbills nearly run us down. The flight 
was on, and putting over the decoys, we anchored 
to leeward. Everybody seemed to be getting 
plenty of shooting, but us, and we resolved to 
shoot at the first thing that hove in sight. That 
“first thing” proved to be a loon, and although 
too far, we both opened up on him, touching him 
all right, for he went howling away into the fog. 
Things were slow after that, and I was just 
filling my pipe when Mayland brought down two 
birds, so quickly that I didn’t know where they 
came from. One was a cripple, and as things 
had been moving rather slow, we decided to get 
into the small boat and chase him. We chased 
him all right, squandering a couple of shells, 
when I discovered that we were losing sight of 
the boat and decoys, so we put back for the 
craft, picking up the other bird as we did so. 
Just before we reached our destination a 
bunch of white wings scaled over the decoys, 
far out of reach. Mayland groaned the whole 
length of him—he’s six feet two—and I echoed 
the lamentation. No use, though, and my com¬ 
panion remarked, “They’re always where you 
ain’t.” Nine times out of ten, when you leave 
the decoys, the birds will come. We had just 
tied on, when four little gray coots whistled over. 
We ripped three guns into them, bringing down 
all four and crippling two. In a moment I was 
in the small boat chasing these. They led me a 
merry chase, and I popped away. Although the 
shot seemed to bury them up each time, yet under 
they’d go, until finally I pumped the remaining 
shells out of my gun to see what they looked 
