Forest and Stream 
Terms, $3 a Year, 10 Cts. a Copy, / 
Six Months, $1.50. ) 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1910. 
j VOL. LXXV.-No. 26. 
I No. 127 Franklin St., New York. 
A WEEKLY JOURNAL. 
Copyright, 1910, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
George Bird Grinnell, President, 
Cbaxx.es B. Reynolds, Secretary, 
Louis I5ian Speix, Treasurer, 
127 Franklin Street, New York. 
THE OBJECT OF THIS JOURNAL 
will be to studiously promote a healthful in¬ 
terest in outdoor recreation, and to cultivate 
a refined taste for natural objects. 
—Forest and Stream, Aug. 14, 187S. 
MERRY CHRISTMAS. 
The longest night of the year has come and 
gone. The fishing season is of the past and the 
hunter’s moon has waned. The yachtsman’s 
craft lies under its snow-covered tarpaulin and 
the canoe is drying on its rack in club house or 
shed, neglected if not forgotten. 
“At Christmas I no more desire a rose 
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth; 
But like of each thing that in season grows.” 
For this is a season of good cheer, happiness 
and contentment, a turning point which hides 
from view the twelvemonth that is now almost 
a memory. It is a time when care is forgotten 
in rejoicing with the little folks, in the pure 
exuberance of living; a time for reunions of 
families and friends; of lightening the burdens 
of others. 
It is a time, too, which more and more of our 
people have come to recognize as the opening 
day for winter pastimes. Skiis, snowshoes, moc¬ 
casins and warm clothing are in season, and he 
who gets the most out of these will find in the 
woods rare charms he little dreamed of when, 
in June, he sought the brook trout, or in autumn 
flushed the ruffed grouse. 
A Merry Christmas to all. 
TO PENSION LIFE SAVERS. 
Many years ago Forest and Stream called the 
attention of Congress to the low rate of pay to 
life savers, to the hard work that they did, in¬ 
cluding long hours, exposure and the risk of 
life, to the fact that they were on duty for part 
of the year only, and the fact that there was no 
provision in the way of pensions or retirement 
on half pay for men injured or worn out in 
the service. 
It is gratifying, therefore, to see that this 
matter is again being taken up, and that Wm. 
Loeb, Jr., Collector of Customs for the Port 
of New York, has headed a petition asking 
Congress to provide old age pensions for mem¬ 
bers of the United States Life Saving Service. 
This is something that Congress should do. 
Men who habitually risk their lives in behalf 
of others, as do the life savers along our coasts 
and the firemen in our great cities, are especially 
deserving of consideration, and of protection 
against the dangers and accidents to which they 
are constantly exposing themselves. In these 
days, when continually increasing pensions are 
being showered on the old soldiers of forty-five 
years ago, it is especially reasonable that the life 
savers who work all along the coast should have 
provision made for their old age. A retired cap¬ 
tain in the revenue service is quoted as speaking 
feelingly of the hard work and exposure to 
which these men are subjected in the course of 
their duty, and he tells of cases where life 
savers worn out in the service are now in dif¬ 
ferent poor houses in New York, New Jersey 
and Massachusetts. 
It is high time that the services of these men 
were recognized. 
MASSACHUSETTS REFUGES. 
While the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 
has more game refuges and parks than perhaps 
any other State in the Union, there are few 
States where such continuous efforts are made 
to do away with these refuges, or to break into 
and destroy them as in Massachusetts. At the 
last legislative session efforts were made to pass 
a bill to permit shooting on lands under the 
control of the Metropolitan Water and Sewerage 
Board—a measure which if passed would have 
opened up large tracts of land to gunners, and 
would have permitted them to shoot ducks on 
certain protected reservoirs. 
It is but a short time since there was pub¬ 
lished a most interesting account of the winter¬ 
ing in and about the city of Boston of wild 
ducks of different species, some of them seldom 
seen in the region. Much has been written of 
the tameness of these protected ducks. 
The dispute over Benson’s Pond, which the 
authorities of the town of Middleboro contem¬ 
plate selling to be turned into a cranberry bog, 
and which other persons wish to have preserved, 
because it is a place where ducks feed and breed 
and where small birds congregate, is fresh in the 
public mind. 
It will be an extraordinary thing if the Mass¬ 
achusetts Legislature shall enact any such de¬ 
structive measures as are proposed. The old 
Bay State has always stood in the forefront of 
progress, and we hope will continue to stand 
there, even though the opponents of protection 
are waging stronger fights than ever before. 
Complete returns from all counties in New 
York State convey the pleasing intelligence that 
the Palisades Park proposition was carried by 
about 63,000 votes. Through their ballots the 
people of New York city and its environs ex¬ 
pressed their appreciation of the project. They 
are to be congratulated; but for them the great 
work would have been held up, perhaps for years. 
Coming, as this final announcement does, on the 
eve of a great day, it becomes a Christmas pres¬ 
ent of priceless value, for it in its splendor is 
imperishable. 
BAD PRACTICE. 
In some States it has been the practice of 
wardens to settle cases afield rather than to take 
offenders before justices of the peace, there to 
be dealt with according to a strict interpretation 
of the game laws. If all wardens were qualified 
to pass upon the merits of cases, and were 
honest as well, it is possible there might be 
some excuse for this, but unfortunately there 
are wardens who are ready and willing to abuse 
the trust imposed in them if by so doing they 
can add to their own earnings. 
In past years such practices were less uncom¬ 
mon than now, but they still exist in places 
where laws are lax and offer loopholes through 
which the petty grafter can squeeze and save his 
face. 
By careful revisions of the game laws it has 
been sought to minimize the opportunities for 
this form of blackmail, but it is still practiced, 
perhaps to a greater extent than is generally 
suspected. Few acts of wardens are so injurious 
to the cause of game protection as these. They 
reflect discredit on the service—on a system al¬ 
ready difficult for the sportsmen to maintain in 
the face of widespread apathy or opposition. Al¬ 
though it is no longer common practice to laugh 
at and ignore the game laws, there is still much 
more of this sort of thing than there should be. 
I he troopers of the Pennsylvania State Con¬ 
stabulary, in addition to keeping the peace, as¬ 
sist the game and fish wardens in the enforce¬ 
ment of the laws. Figures compiled at the De¬ 
partment of State Police showing the work of 
the four troops during the hunting season indi¬ 
cate that of eighty-seven arrests made, eighty- 
six resulted in conviction. The single, exception 
was in the case of a man arrested for being in 
illegal possession of firearms, who appealed his 
case. The police arrested two men for hunting 
with ferrets, seventy-one for being in possession 
of firearms when not naturalized, one for being 
in illegal possession of game, two for destroy¬ 
ing birds’ nests, two for shooting insectivorous 
birds, three for shooting game out of season, 
one for hunting without license and five for 
hunting deer with dogs. 
In Burlington county, New Jersey, a land- 
owner last April started a brush fire on his prop¬ 
erty, and finally extinguished it, as he thought. 
It afterward started afresh, spread, and before 
it could be controlled had burned over 7,000 
acres of land in the State Forest Park Reserva¬ 
tion. In the suit instituted by the Reservation 
Commission, a magistrate in Burlington county 
held that, under the law every person who starts 
a fire shall be held responsible for any damage 
that it may cause, but as the landowner in ques¬ 
tion displayed no wilful negligence, the mini¬ 
mum fine only was imposed. 
