Forest and Stream 
$3 a Year, 10 Cts. a Copy, 
Six Months, $1.50. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MARCH 1, 1913. 
VOL. LXXX.—No. 0. 
187 Franklin St., New York 
In the Woods with Allie 
A GREAT painter of the Renaissance once 
got even with a bitter enemy, whose 
political position rendered him otherwise 
immune, by immortalizing him in a celebrated 
painting of the Inferno as one of the principal 
devils. The method always appealed to me, and 
1 have a list of certain individuals whose char¬ 
acters I have long contemplated placing in a 
very lurid literary Inferno. Judge, then, of my 
indignant astonishment when, before I had gath¬ 
ered sufficient courage for the attack, to find this 
method tried on myself! You have all read this 
calumnious caricature of a pure and simple soul 
offered to a jeering public under the title of 
‘‘The Tent Dwellers,” which purports to relate 
the adventures of the author, two Bluenose 
guides and my very humble self. Now this man 
came down to my cabin in the woods with a 
halo of innocence about his head and begged 
forsooth for the privilege of enjoying the primi¬ 
tive wilderness in my experienced company, etc. 
And in the largeness of my heart I took him in, 
this viper, and warmed him for weeks in my 
bosom. I opened to him the wondrous secrets 
of the great unknown. For days and days we 
paddled and fished and slept shoulder to shoul¬ 
der, while he covertly studied me at this close 
range, he and his insidious camera. Worse yet, 
he entered into a foul conspiracy with a man 
who heaves charcoal for the magazines, to issue 
caricatures of me, a respectable, habitually good 
looking person, in the public press. You know 
the deplorable result; the book has sold like 
wildfire, and the length of two normal lives 
would not suffice me to eliminate those staring 
goggles and that dervish beard from literature. 
Two considerations particularly irritated me; 
firstly, that not one cent of the big royalties on 
this book ever dropped into my yawning coffers, 
directly, anyhow; and, secondly, that the artist 
not only handed down to posterity a totally 
wrong impression of my particular style of 
beauty, but actually had the appalling assurance 
to make that man Allie, really a shambling, over¬ 
grown creature, go down to history as an Adonis. 
When the book first appeared, I thought only 
of blood. The double murder of a prominent 
author and a w'ell-known artist, followed by a 
sensational homicide, in self-defense, would not 
only assuage my thirst for vengeance, but drag 
me out of the semi-nirvana in which an apathetic 
public had thus far left me to languish. But 
something—was it my New England conscience? 
—caused me to abandon this fell plan, and I de¬ 
termined to sue both author and artist for defa¬ 
mation of character. But again it occurred to 
me that such a cause celebre would only tend to 
By EDWARD BRECK 
increase the sale of the book, and thus put more 
money into my enemies’ purses. Also I should 
be laughed at for not possessing timber heroic 
enough to take a joke, even when it resulted 
in my being placed on record for all time as a 
begoggled and hirsute anarchist, or a priest of 
the hairy Ainos of Northern Japan. I therefore 
determined to dissemble and invite Allie to come 
again to my cabin for a little trip. I would 
study him, as he did me, at closest range, note 
every idiosyncrasy and petty foible, and then— 
but the rest could confidently be left to my ruth¬ 
less pen. I invited him once, twice, thrice, but 
apparently he ever suspected something; he 
feared Eddie even when sending honeyed words. 
One year he raced across the continent on the 
trail of the younger Twain; the next he was 
building a shanty in Connecticut; the third he 
sailed away to the Orient on a modern “Quaker 
City.” But this year, at last, he consented. I 
exulted when the acceptance came, for I felt 
that I held his reputation in the hollow of my 
hand. Down should go my ruthless thumb and 
the contents spilled in the mire of jeering pub¬ 
licity. Paraphrasing Napoleon before Waterloo, 
I exclaimed : “I have him, this Allie !” 
And then, all at once, there we were, Allie 
and Unk and I, with our guides Charles the 
Strong (he of the “ rent Dwellers”), Lou Har¬ 
low tne mimic, the mighty hunter, and Horace 
who “trims the bunch" with rifle and paddle at 
every guide's meet. Once more cleaving the 
dimpled waters of Fairy Lake in mid Septem¬ 
ber—glorious season in the north woods ! Every 
birch and beech is a burst of yellow, every maple 
a flaming torch. The rocks are white along the 
shore, breaking the lush line of reddened hard¬ 
backs. The birds have not yet left. The robin 
and kingbird linger, and the jays never desert 
us, neither he of the gaudy azure nor his more 
homely but ‘‘cuter’’ cousin, whiskey-jack. The 
eerie cry of the loon, the ghostly flight of the 
heron, the raucous squawks of crow and raven, 
the measured whirr of the ducks overhead, the 
stirring crescendo of the cock grouse's drum solo 
—all these were delights to eye and ear. ]My 
face tingled in the fresh breeze, but my heart 
was so warm and contented that I almost re¬ 
lented tow'ard Allie, sitting there half doubled 
up in the bow of his canoe. 
Nevertheless the spirit of trouble was pres¬ 
ent, though often latent, from the first. Unk had 
“UNK,” “ALLIE,” “EDDIE.” 
