586 
Published Weekly by the 
Forest and Stream Publishing Company 
Chas. A. Hazen, President Charles L. Wise, Treasurer 
W. G. Beecroft, Sec’y Russell A. Lewis, Gen. Mgr. 
22 Thames Street, New York. 
CORRESPONDENCE: — Forest and Stream is the re¬ 
cognized medium of entertainment, instruction and in¬ 
formation betvveen 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. 
SUBSCRIPTIONS: $3 a year; $1.50 for six months; 
'jo Cents a copy. Canadian, $4 a year; foreign, $4.50 a year. 
This paper may be obtained of newsdealers throughout 
the United States, Canada and Great Britain. Foreign 
Subscriptions and Sales Agents—London: Davies & Co., 
1 Finch Lane; Sampson, Low & Co. Paris: Brentano’s. 
Entered in New York Post Office as Second class matter. 
THE OBJECT OF THIS JOURNAL 
will be to studiously promote a healthful interest 
in outdoor recreation, and to cultivate a refined 
taste for natural objects. 
—Forest and Stream, Aug. 14, 1873 
HEALTH VS. BUSINESS. 
Apart from all considerations of sport, it is an 
essential part of a man’s nature that he spend part 
of the time out of doors every year, if he would 
live up to the best capabilities of his being. It is 
a physical and mental necessity for him to do so. 
The life of many a busy man attests how un¬ 
consciously, yet thoroughly, one can become a 
drudge from long-continued habit. He becomes 
so habituated to his work that he grows to be 
part of it. It blends with his being. He imagines 
that without him the work could not go on; that 
if he went away for a day or a week, everything 
would go wrong, and that loss or ruin would 
follow. 
He forgets that life at the best has limits, and 
that the natural limit may be shortened more or 
less by living under conditions which are too arti¬ 
ficial and exacting for his well being. 
He forgets that if he takes a week or more this 
year for an outing in the woods he may be adding 
one year or ten years to his life. If he loses a 
week from business he may be with his business 
much longer at the finish, not to mention the bet¬ 
ter health, spirits and capabilities gained from a 
rest in the open air. 
That one can unconsciously become merely an 
animated machine, from the force of habit es¬ 
tablished by following a fixed routine day after 
day and week after week, there are incidents 
■connected with the life of every dweller in a city 
which testify. At some time, after a long stay 
penned within the walls of bricks, one goes into 
the country. At sight of the woods and the 
flowers and the green fields his spirits rise. He 
is delighted. He sniffs the fresh air with a sense 
■of relief. He feels an independence which is new 
•to him. The music of the song birds has a 
sweetness unrivaled by any instrumental music. 
Those who have had the good fortune to have 
'lived a camp life for a while in the woods, moun¬ 
tains or on the prairies, know what wonderful 
(.constitutional vigor is gained; what sound and 
FOREST ANDJSTREAM 
sweet sleep has been theirs; what labors they 
could endure without fatigue, and what little 
sauce the coarsest food required, other than the 
sauce of hunger. It was all due to living nearer 
to nature’s laws. 
After living in camp and having returned to 
town, how stuffy and close the rooms seemed; 
how hard it was to get steadied to business 
again; how easy it seemed for the business to 
go on while you were absent in the woods, and 
how you could remember a wider and better 
horizon than you had thought of before. 
But after days and weeks of routine, the force 
of habit begins to assert itself, life again blends 
with business; cares grow and are cumulatively 
carried along; business cannot get along without 
you—and it is then time to go to the woods again. 
THE OLD MUZZLE LOADER. 
There are still in use many muzzle-loading shot 
guns, chiefly among the negroes in the South, 
and the farmers in the far West. The weapons 
are so ridiculously cheap that they go into the 
hands of impecunious shooters who could never 
dream of raising funds for a breech-loader, in¬ 
expensive as some may be. 
Here and there, too, an old fogy is found, who 
still clings to the muzzle-loader for no other 
reason than that it was the arm he started out 
with in youth, and what was good enough for him 
then he thinks is good enough for him now. 
Quite likely he will stand up for the merits of 
the antiquated weapon, arguing most stubbornly 
and perversely, but believing quite as firmly that 
it will shoot harder than any new-fangled gun 
ever invented. 
When you meet such a champion of the arm of 
antiquity, you find in him a shooting character 
well worth studying; and you must take him, not 
indeed critically and without feeling, but sympa¬ 
thetically and with an appreciation of his foibles. 
Touched on subjects other than guns and shoot¬ 
ing, he will perhaps be found quite as old-fash¬ 
ioned in thoughts and ways. 
We wish well to every champion of the old 
time arm. May they all live yet many days to 
show us what the queer relics can do. Who 
knows but that some of the youngest of us may 
yet live to see the time when another generation, 
equipped with hand artillery not now imagined, 
shall deride the breech-loader, in our day so es¬ 
teemed as the final triumph of the gunsmith’s art? 
THE BRIGHTER SIDE. 
Filth and fiction—those are two things that 
ought not to go together: yet the moralists are 
now very busy telling us that the fiction which 
crowds the news stands and book stalls has large¬ 
ly to do with uncleanness. It is filthy, right out 
and openly, or by veiled suggestion, and not so 
thickly veiled either that it is not decidedly sug¬ 
gestive. The most discouraging feature of the 
situation, the complaints affirm, is that the worse 
the book the more certain and speedy and exten¬ 
sive is its success. Give a dog a bad name and 
hang him; but give a book a bad name and its 
sale is assured. This, they aver, is an indication 
of the moral decay of the age. 
Perhaps it is and perhaps it is not. There has 
never been an age of whose literary phases any¬ 
thing is known, when morally rotten books did 
not “go,” and until human nature shall be sup¬ 
planted on this globe by something better, such a 
time will never come in the future. 
But there is another and brighter side of the 
literary phenomena of the day. Crowding the 
news stands and book counters, shoulder to 
shoulder with these unworthy products of the 
pen, and now more sturdy, numerous and popu¬ 
lar than ever before, is the literature of outdoor 
life and the open air. It is a literature which is 
of the open and of the woodland, pure and health¬ 
ful, wholesome to body and spirit. The books 
and the papers which relate to the streams and 
the fields, the plains and the mountain peaks, have 
in them the freshness of the upper air, the clear, 
clean brightness of the sunshine, the stimulating, 
uplifting, exalting fragrance of the forest. 
We have for years held a theory—which, for 
years too, has been put so successfully to the 
test of observation and record that it may be 
accepted as an established principle rather than 
a theory—that the spirit which finds pleasure in 
the sports of the field forbids and precludes a sup¬ 
port of the decadent literature of the day. Par¬ 
ticipation in the innocent pleasures of forest and 
stream, river, lake, bay and ocean, the rod and 
gun, oar and sail, works for the ‘upbuilding of 
manliness, and for the purity of thought and 
speech, which is a part of manhood. Readers of 
a sportsmen's journal are not as a class sup¬ 
porters of unhealthy, decadent and filthy fiction. 
If you are among those who believe that the 
world is all the time growing better, you must 
share the Forest and Stream’s faith in a coming 
correction of the literary conditions of which 
students of morals complain. The ink-wells of 
the filth purveyors will go dry, and their pens 
will corrode; but so long as the trout shall lure 
the angler to the sparkling waters and the brown 
feathers hurtling through the cover shall cause 
the gunner’s heart to bound, the journalism of 
the field will flourish, for the pure entertainment 
of clean-minded men. 
TRAPSHOOTING ON THE ROOF. 
The man who trapshoots begins, in the sum¬ 
mer time, to find difficulty in locating a shooting 
ground. We have endeavored to eliminate this 
difficulty by introducing a novelty in the way of 
aerial trapshooting—that—calling pull way up 
in the air—which often is the case with buck ague 
trapshooters. The roof of the Grand Central 
Palace, awhile ago made into a sportsman’s 
paradise, has, temporarily been set back, but we 
hope, and we, Forest and Stream trapshooters, 
feel sure that within a few weeks will be ready 
for occupation. Will you help us promote the 
great big present day of shooting without a bag 
limit by subscribing to the roof shooting club—- 
ask us for particulars. 
THE SHAD SEASON. 
That the shad have been slow in coming up 
the Delaware this season is said by fishermen to 
be due to the unseasonably cold weather. But 
already they are appearing in constantly increas¬ 
ing numbers, prices are dropping, and the pros¬ 
pects are that shad will be both cheap and plen¬ 
tiful this spring. 
A plan for stocking the lakes and streams of 
the National parks and reservations with fish and 
maintaining the supply by the systematic transfer 
of young fish has been proposed to Secretary of 
the Interior Lane by Secretary Redfield, who sug¬ 
gests a comprehensive survey of the field by the 
Bureau of Fisheries and co-operation between 
the two departments in the work. 
