52 
temptation of bright-hued artificial flowers, in 
which were hidden vials of honey and water. 
The club built baths for the birds, with sloping 
flat stones, so as to vary the depth of the water; 
and, in order to make the bath attractive, light 
lunches were set out near the edge. The birds 
would take a dip, a bite and then another dip. 
A. H. ROBINSON. 
WEST SOMMERVILLE ROD AND GUN CLUB. 
The West Sommerville Rod and Gun Club of 
Somerville, Mass has a very limited membership. 
The name sounds like numbers. It would in¬ 
dicate a list of Officers, Board of Directors, 
Executive Committee, in 'fact all that usually goes 
to make up the club of the day. In this case 
the name is unintentionally deceptive. There 
are just about a dozen members in this associa¬ 
tion, really a neighborhood club in which pre¬ 
vails the closest acquaintanceship welded to¬ 
gether by association on many trips to the Big 
Woods. Each year the list of desirable fishing 
waters is well canvassed and the place selected 
by vote. King and Bartlett has always been a 
favorite and on Saturday last seven members 
of the Club left the North Station in Boston 
bound for this preserve. Those who went were: 
Z. E. Cliff, Mayor of Somerville, Jesse Perry, 
Frank A. Teele, Charles Cosgrove, W. A. Snow, 
Asa Foster and Dr George C. Mahoney. This 
is the third or fourth time the party has visited 
that very interesting country and as they know 
the trails and waters so well no time is lost in 
locating the fishing and getting to it quickly. 
The two or three weeks of their sojourn will 
be spent about equally at Big King and Big 
Spencer Lakes. In this first mentioned lake the 
principal fish taken are squaretails and they 
average, with singular regularity, about one 
pound each. In Little King both trout and sal¬ 
mon are taken. In Big Spencer the chief fish 
is lake trout and they run to large size. Several 
smaller ponds afford fine trout fishing and flow¬ 
ing through this preserve is Spencer stream one 
of Maine’s most famous trout-waters. In other 
years good catches have been the regular order 
with this Somerville party. I trust results will 
be equally good this year. It remained for a 
school teacher—of the gentler sex—with a sin¬ 
gular misconception of the virtues of fishermen 
and possibly a strong dislike of the gentle art 
to embody in a letter some expressive language 
descriptive of the untruthfulness of those de¬ 
voted to the use of the rod. In the Superior 
Court at Worcester, Mass, at the trial of Daniel 
J. Cooper on the charge of murder there was in¬ 
troduced in evidence a letter written by the 
teacher to whom “Cooper” went to school. She 
described her pupil as low in morals, indifferent, 
slouchy, unbusinesslike, dull, impertinent, stub¬ 
born, sulky and a liar with whom a fisherman 
could not compete. Very many of the Mas- 
sachussets judges are anglers and if he who is 
sitting in this case is devoted to fishing it must 
have afforded him some entertaining thought. 
One of the press comments on the evidence 
burlesques the matter by saying that fishermen 
are forced to lie by the smallness of their catches 
but a fisherman’s lie is of a harmless sort. He 
is a guileless child of nature and if he lies he 
lies like a gentleman not as one who merits the 
harsh words of a teacher whose patience has 
been exhausted by a dull and sulky pupil. 
FOREST AND STREAM 
Another name was added last week to the 
long roll of Anglers who have crossed the Great 
Divide. Dr Amos Lawrence Mason of Boston 
passed away at Menands near Albany, N. Y. 
when he was stricken with heart failure while 
enroute to Camp Harmony on the Restigouche 
for his annual salmon fishing trip. It had been 
his custom to spend a month on the river each 
year and he keenly enjoyed the sport. There 
are now left in Boston very few of that de¬ 
lightful class of older anglers of which there 
seemed to be so many but a few years ago. 
Death has taken most of them and with the pas¬ 
sing there seems to have vanished much that 
was ideal in sportsmanship. 
Mr. F. H. Talcott, of Holbrook, Mass., returned 
a few days ago from a month’s stay in Nova 
Scotia. He reports very good* fishing for trout, 
his catches averaging quite large from day to 
day. Mr Talcott uses nothing but the fly and 
puts many fish back only keeping those which 
can be used. The salmon fishing during the 
third week in May was excellent but afterward 
up to the time of his leaving for home the water 
was too low. Most of his salmon fishing was 
done in a branch of the Tuscot river. He re¬ 
lates one interesting incident which is worth 
mentioning. Near his camp there is a high dam 
in the river over which the water falls making 
an eddying pool of foaming water below. In 
the forenoon of May 24th a party of four were 
casting for salmon in this pool. They had plenty 
of flies and considerable skill but never rose a 
fish- Mr Talcott had been after trout that morn¬ 
ing but on his return—finding the strangers gone 
—concluded to try his luck in the pool. Attach¬ 
ing here a cow dung fly to his leader he made 
a cast with his five ounce rod which landed the 
fly in the foaming water at the further side of 
the pool. A fish rose to it and was promptly 
hooked. With his light tackle in that heavy 
water he had some battle to bring that fish to 
the net. In rapid succession he landed four sal¬ 
mon, the heaviest weighing eleven pounds and 
took all o'f them on cow dung flies, about the last 
fly one wouid ever select for salmon as it has no 
distinctive coloring and practically all the salmon 
flies in common use are brilliant in gold, silver 
and scarlet. For the humble and homely old cow 
dung to beat out its rainbow lrued competitors is 
going some and shows what may be done by way 
of experiment. 
There has just returned from North East 
Carry, Moosehad Lake, Maine, a gentleman who 
has discovered something. He has found out 
that viewed from any angle it pays to go fishing. 
If opportunity does not present itself, make one, 
send business to the dogs—on occasion—and 
light out. This worker left the daily grind re¬ 
luctantly, thought he could not be spared but he 
'has returned with a new lease of life and an en¬ 
thusiasm for the game that promises to last in¬ 
definitely. At the rate he is advancing he will 
soon parallel the New Hampshire man who in a 
moment of desperation the result of overwrought 
nerves closed his office door and tacked a notice 
on the outside “I’ve gone fishing, you go to—.” 
This gentleman who has made a discovery is Mr. 
G. H. Mansfield of Canton, Mass. Accompanied 
by two friends he left for Maine determined to 
verify some fishing stories he had heard and in¬ 
cidentally to absorb all the pure laden atmos¬ 
phere that was not tied down. His appearance 
indicates what the latter did for him and as for 
the fishing, well, I have his word in which I have 
always had much faith. The party, almost any 
day, took as many squaretails as any one ought- 
to have and usually did this in 3 or 4 
hours. The fish ran heavy quite a number up to 
4 and 5 pounds. Fishing in deeper water they 
had no trouble getting many lake trout, one day 
landing twenty. 
“HACKLE.” 
OHIO NOTES. 
Castalia, O., June 1.—The three trout clubs in 
this vicinity are entertaining the usual number of 
members and guests this season and the splendid 
sport that has been provided for the past 35 
years, by that great natural wonder, the Castalia 
underground stream, is as much enjoyed as ever. 
Last year the Castalia Trout Club hatched 
600,000 trout fry and planted 325,000 year-old fish 
:n December. The Castalia Sporting Club planted 
about 30,000 trout, while the Rockwell Springs 
Club also planted a large number. 
Considering their locality, the Castalia trout 
streams are indeed natural wonders, furnishing 
as they do, the only real brook trout fishing in 
the state of Ohio. The supply of water for 
the Castalia Springs, comes from a drainage of 
75 square miles of territory, south of Castalia. 
The division of the water-shed is somewhere in 
the vicinity of Bucyrus, Ohio, where all the rain¬ 
fall enters sink holes, underlying which are lime¬ 
stone stratas unquestionably with great caves. 
The dividing line at the water-shed pitches to¬ 
ward the Ohio River. This limestone strata 
comes to the surface at Kelleys Island, in Lake 
Erie and extends into East Tennessee. The 
Mammoth Cave in Kentucky is in this strata. 
There are no surface streams in this territory. 
As a rule, one-third of the rainfall is con¬ 
sumed by the earth, one-third by evaporation and 
one-third by surface streams. As there is no 
evaporation here from the fact that the water 
enters sink holes, the Castalia Springs deliver two- 
thirds of the annual rainfall. In case of short¬ 
age in the annual rainfall, the springs at Cas¬ 
talia flow less water, and flow more water in 
excessive rainfall. 
The Castalia Springs, under normal condi¬ 
tions, empty 30,000 gallons of water per minute, 
of which the Blue Hole furnishes about 6,000 
gallons. Last spring, during the great Ohio 
floods, the streams delivered at least 100,000 gal¬ 
lons per minute. The water comes from the 
springs at all seasons of the year, at even tem¬ 
perature of 50 degrees. 
Thirty-five years ago the Castalia Trout and 
Castalia Sporting Clubs were formed. The two 
clubs fish along the same stream, each having 
about 5V2 miles of stream rights. Grover Cleve¬ 
land, Philander C. Knox and other notables have 
fished along the banks of the stream and en¬ 
joyed the sport afforded. 
Both clubs are endeavoring to exterminate the 
German Brown trout, which formerly abounded 
in great numbers, because of their voracious 
