FEB, 3, 1906.] 

FOREST AND STREAM. 
171 

lose her, and I cried in anger and sorrow; then, 
alone, I tore myself away from where she lay and 
started once more on the trail to my people. I 
am an old man now, but many winters have not 
buried my sorrow. I still mourn for her, and 
I shall do so as long as I live.” 
Nat-ah’-ki often reverted to this story of the 
old man. “Kyai,-yo!” she would exclaim. “How 
poor, how sad.” 
“Who—what?” I would ask. 
“Why, the Kutenai’s young woman, of course. 
Only think, to die just as she had found happi- 
ness; never to see again the sunshine, and the 
mountains, and these beautiful plains.’ 
“She never saw these plains,’ I said once, 
when we were talking about the story. Hers 
was a country of forests and great rivers, of rains 
and fogs.” 
Nat-ah’-ki shivered. “I do not wish to see that 
country!” she exclaimed. “I hate the rain; al- 
ways I want to live on these sunshine plains. 
How good Old Man* was to give us this rich 
country.” WALTER B. ANDERSON. 
[TO BE CONTINUED. | 

*The Blackfoot world maker. 
Romancing. 
THERE is an ancient story that ought to be told 
occasionally—for the benefit of those who strain 
at a gnat and swallow a camel—of an old lady 
whose boy ran away to sea, returning after many 
years’ wandering, and who wept over the awful 
mendacity of the boy when he told her of a mon- 
ster of the deep, sixty feet long, that wrecked 
boats and killed men by a blow from its tail; of 
great sharks that attacked and devoured unwary 
swimmers and of flying-fish, but who embraced 
him and forgave him for all these awful lies 
when he told her of their pulling up a wheel off 
of one of Pharaoh’s chariots on their ship’s 
anchor in the Red Sea. We who write of the 
incidents that come under our observation, and 
occasionally embellish them, often have our pure 
fiction accepted as fact, and our wunvarnished 
truths branded as fiction, and so unwittingly 
prove that truth is stranger than fiction—to some 
people. 
A kindly disposed friend will occasionally call 
your attention to the ease with which he separates 
the wheat of truth from the chaff of fiction, in 
something you have written, and often will have 
the former in the fuel heap and the latter in the 
grain bin, but if you love him, let it go at that 
and thereby keep your friend. That an incident 
tecounted is out of the ordinary is no argument 
affecting its truthfulness. If not unusual and 
strange in some particular, why tell it, with the 
hope that it will interest or entertain the reader? 
Many men eat fish for dinner in the city every 
day, which fact interests no one saving and ex- 
cepting the fish dealer. But one prominent, pros- 
perous and well known citizen gets a bone of his 
fish fast in his throat one day, which chokes him 
to death, and thereupon the victim of the acci- 
dent, the bone, the table and the waiter are one 
and all portrayed upon the front page of the daily 
papers, with full and detailed accounts of how it 
happened. 
So even so insignificant a thing as a small fish 
bone can change an incident from trivial to tragic, 
and many will read and believe though they see 
not the bone nor be acquainted with the man. 
We all know many incidents great and small, 
that are out of the ordinary, and of interest, some 
of which we allow to remain untold for fear of 
the doubter. And yet I am sure that most of us, 
when disseminating hot air products, use due dili- 
gence to see that the output is duly branded, 
while molten, to the eye of the fair and reason- 
able reader. 
I often think of an amusing out of the ordi- 
nary incident that came under my observation in 
Florida last winter. We were at an hotel on the 
Halifax River where the fishing was good, and 
one day a very large sheepshead was brought in 
by a lucky fisherman. When all had seen and ad- 
mired the fish it was turned over to Bill, the ex- 
pert fish cleaner, for preparation for the table. 
This Bill accomplished by removing the scales 
and slicing off each side, leaving the big head 
and frame, including back fin and tail, intact. 
I watched the two great slices of white flesh 
laid carefully on a tray to be carried to the 
kitchen, the frame, with its big head and bright 
eyes, cast as far out into the water as Bill’s strong 
arm could throw it, and as the diplomats say, 
considered the incident closed. 
The next morning several of us were fishing off 
a point of rocks near the wharf when a new 
arrival appeared and began casting out with a 
heavy hand line. The second cast he hooked 
something, and although it made little resistance, 
he was novice enough: to grow much excited and 
hauled in hand over hand as though he were 
landing a record fish. We were all watching, 
mildly interested, when, with a final jerk, he 
landed his catch, ‘which proved to be the frame of 
the big sheepshead above referred to, and which 
was fairly hooked (by accident I admit) in the 
mouth. 
To say that we were surprised is to mildly ex- 
press our condition, but the lucky (?) fisherman 
was a little more than this. He was profoundly 
astonished, and genuinely frightened. At first it 
looked as ‘though he would faint, and then as he 
surveyed the big open mouth, with its double row 
of white teeth, and gruesome skeleton body, he 
tried to run. We soon explained matters and 
quieted his fears, but he fished no more that day. 
Now, this is an example of the unusual and 
unexpected happening, but if I told this story, as 
I positively decline to do, some fellow would 
write to know if my real name was Munchausen. 
Or this incident, told by a native of Florida, a 
young man of character and standing: 
“Accompanied by a negro man I was looking 
for a cow that had strayed off in the woods when 
we discovered a lusty rattlesnake. Arming our- 
selves with sticks of safe length we attacked and 
quickly dispatched it. The skin of such large 
snakes having ready sale, I determined to secure 
this one, expecting my companion to do the skin- 
ning, as I had never even seen such an operation 
performed. But there I had another guess com- 
ing, for my man positively refused to even as- 
sist me, 
“*Naw, suh!’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t tech dat rep- 
tile. dead nor live, for all de money you could 
stuff in de hide, big as he is.’ 
“It was up to me, so pulling off my coat and 
turning up my shirt sleeves I prepared to wade 
in. In order to avoid all possibility of accident I 
persuaded the man to stand on a heavy stick laid 
across the snake’s neck while I cut off the head. 
which I threw away a safe distance. Then as 
the body writhed and twisted in the usual man- 
ner of a dying snake, I reached in among the 
coils trying to grasp the tail to cut off the rattles. 
When I finally got hold of it the snake’s body 
had assumed the position which the rattler in- 
variably takes when about to strike. 
“Intent upon securing the rattles unbroken, I 
was stooping over carefully drawing them from 
the coil with my left hand and advancing the 
other in which IJ held the knife, the negro man 
a little further away, but leaning forward watch- 
ing with interest, when suddenly the snake sprang 
forward, the end of its bloody neck striking me 
with great force on the bare arm, just below my 
upturned sleeve, knocking the knife from my 
hand and causing me—more from fright than 
force of the blow—to pitch over backward. 
“T have had narrow escapes before and since 
that time, but never before nor since have I suf- 
fered anything like the awful horror I felt on 
that occasion when bitten by a dead snake. I 
fairly writhed in agony for a few minutes, trying . 
all the time to gain my self-control and realize 
that I was frightened and not hurt. 
“T do not know that I was noisy, but may have 
been, for my companion was fairly splitting the 
air with shrieks of terror that would have 
drowned the braying of a fog horn. He had been 
close to me, and the sudden and wholly unex- 
pected attack of the dead and headless snake, act- 
ing upon his emotional and superstitious tempera- 
ment, frightened him nearly to death. The first 
use he made of his recovered breath was to pro- 
nounce my doom. 
“You is a goner, suh! You might live a few 
houahs, an’ may be two or three days, but you is 
dis as good as dead. Ain’ nobody goin’ git well 
when bit by a live snake, let alone a dead one.’ 
“T didn’t skin that snake, nor have I ever tried 
to skin once since.” 
But the doubter will git you if you don’t watch 
out. Lewis Hopkins. 
A Florida Winter. 
THE winter of 1903-4 was severe in the Ver- 
mont woods. For months the mercury lingered 
affectionately around zero, went down to 42 de- 
grees below and curled up in the bulb. The 
Madam and I made a vow right then that when 
Old Winter again got his icy grip on forest and 
stream we would follow the last of the migrants 
toward the Southland. 
And we did it. When the brilliant autumnal 
days had fled before the fierce old man, and the 
silent brown woods and ice-locked streams gave 
mute token of the coming winter, we began a dili- 
gent study of maps, routes and various books 
and pamphlets containing much misinformation 
on the subject of Florida. 
We chose Florida first, because nowhere else 
could we get so great a climatic change for the 
same number of days travel, secondly because no 
one place offered so great a variety of shooting 
and fishing combined with a mild winter. 
We went via the Seaboard Air Line; and from 
every officer and employee we were the recipients 
of courteous, thoughtful attention. Sportsmen 
going to Florida via the Seaboard Air Line may 
count on the very best of attention for them- 
selves, dogs and outfits. 
Through an advertisement in ForEST AND 
STREAM we learned of the Jolly Palms, a sports- 
men’s resort at Mohawk, in the mountains of 
Florida. These “mountains” are a chain of hills 
in the southern part of Lake county, central 
Florida, about twelve miles long, from north to 
south and six miles wide. They are from 100 to 
200 feet high, covered but in rather open order 
with the long-leafed or pitch pine of the South. 
More or less thickly scattered between the pines 
is the scrub oak or black jack. The sandy soil 
is sparsely covered with wire grass, patches of 
saw palmetto, and an occasional thicket of rose- 
mary. Nestling among these hills are numberless 
small, shallow, clear-water lakes with grassy 
shores and nearly always partly bordered by 
hammocks—densely wooded tracts of live oak, 
hickory, bay, magnolia and other hard-wood trees, 
from whose branches the beautiful gray moss 
hangs in great profusion and beneath which the 
saw palmetto grows rankly, forming a safe re- 
treat for wild cats, foxes, ’coons (rac), oppos- 
sums, rabbits and cat squirrels, while on the hills 
are deer, fox, squirrels, doves and quail. The 
lakes are well stocked with fish—bass, bream, 
pickerel, and perch, and in their season alliga- 
tors, otter, turtles, ducks, snipe and waterfowl 
of many kinds make the list of wild life of the 
country a long one. 
This hill and lake region is very sparsely set- 
tled and is practically unknown to the tourist, 
but more about that later. Mohawk is a metrop- 
olis of three houses. The T. & G. R. R. (humor- 
ously dubbed the Turtle and Gopher) runs 
through Mohawk, connecting at Tavares, twenty 
miles “distant, with the Seaboard Line from Jack- 
sonville. There is a daily mail and only one and 
a half miles distant is a telegraph office, drug 
store, doctor and general store. 
The Jolly Palms is the home of Mr. C. H. 
Stokes, a photographer by profession. The 
“Doctor,” as his friends call him, has a small 
comfortable home built on the shores of Lake 
Juanita, and accommodates about a dozen guests 
every winter. A small grove of orange and grape 
fruit supplies the table with an abundance of fruit, 
and two Jersey cows furnish rich cream to which 
our northern palates are accustomed but which 
is so rare in Florida. Other important features 
of the doctor’s equipment are three horses, sev- 
eral pointers, two boats and a camp outfit. Each 
guest is allowed a reasonable use of these without 
extra charge. 
