KORES TAN D S.GREAM. 





An Angler’s Reminiscences. 
CHARLESTOWN, N. H., Jan. 31.—Editor Forest 
and Stream: Let me add my congratulation to 
those of your many other correspondents, on the 
improved appearance of the new version of 
Forest AND STREAM. 
I wish that the photo of the log jam had been 
available at the time of the “Red Gods” contro- 
versy two years ago. It shows the rushing 
stream and the log jam at right angles with it to 
perfection. We had such a jam here last sum- 
mer, when the annual log drive of the Connecti- 
cut River Lumber Company caught on the piers 
of Cheshire Bridge, a mile above here, which 
reached an eighth of a mile up the river, and 
took the “drivers” a fortnight to break out. 
Your readers well know that I am nothing if 
not critical at times, and I have a good-natured 
shot to fire to-day. The quotation from ‘The 
Lady of the Lake” by our eloquent old friend, 
Mr. Starbuck, is misplaced. The words he quotes 
were not uttered by Roderick Dhu, but by Fitz- 
James, alias James IV. of Scotland, when sur- 
prised by the rebellious Clan-Alpine, in the gorge 
of the Trosachs. The remarks of Roderick on 
the occasion were, “These are Clan-Alpine’s war- 
riors true; and, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu!” to 
which Fitz-James replied as quoted. After Rod- 
erjek had ordered his clan back into concealment, 
and escorted his guest to the end of the defile, at 
Coilantogle Ford, the fatal duel occurred, the 
result of which such of your readers as are not 
familiar with Scott’s poems, may foretell from 
the following lines: 
“Til fared it then with Roderick Dhu, 
That on the field his targe he threw, 
Whose brazen studs and tough bull-hide 
Had death so often dashed aside; 
For, trained abroad his arms to wield, 
Fitz-James’s blade was sword and shield.” 
If. any of them have not read the poem, let 
them read it, for the sake of the description of 
the stag-hunt, in the First Canto. 
And now for my other shot. I want to pro- 
test against the suggestion of another correspon- 
dent, to change the name of the “pike” to the 
‘“Sackfish.” The fish in question is often called 
“jack” in the east of England, and was a “lac” 
in the west in the time of Shakespeare, but to 
call him a “‘jackfish” is a tautology, as bad as 
that of calling our national emblem an “eagle- 
bird,” indulged in by rustic poets and orators. 
There is no doubt of his being a fish, why repeat 
it? It is certain that he is neither a jacksnipe 
nor a jackass, and his ancient cognomen of pike 
should not be taken from him, because some ig- 
norant fisherman has seen fit to call a long-nosed 
perch a wall-eyed pike. The same fish is also a 
“Susquehanna salmon,’ while his huge thorny 
dorsal fin shows that he is in no way related to 
either pike or salmon. Abolish the misnomers 
and let the genuine pike alone. If pike-perch is 
too long a name, call that fish a “doré,” as in 
Canada, or a “sauger,’ as on the continent of 
Enrope. 
I well remember my wonderment sixty years 
ago in reading in the memoir of Charles W. 
Webber, the author of “Old Hicks, the Guide” 
and sundry other sporting sketches, the account 
of his escaping punishment for truancy from 
school, by presenting the schoolmaster with an 
11-pound trout. I knew that there were no such 
trout in the Southern States, and was inclined 
to treat the story as a fiction until, years after- 
ward, I discovered that trout, in the South, meant 
a large-mouthed black bass. 
Now, let me turn back to the last number of 
the last volume, and say how much I enjoyed 
Mr. Samuels’ letter on “Brook Trout Fishing.” 
This fishing has been the great enjoyment of my 
life, and although I have cast the fly on our 
northern lakes, caught perch in the summer and 




A.AND RIVER FISHING 
pickerel in the winter in our ponds and rivers, 
and cod and haddock off the New England coast, 
I have never had the pleasure in any other fish- 
ing that I have had in sauntering along the 
mountain trout brooks of Vermont and New 
Hampshire, not to mention more or less angling 
in Maine and Massachusetts. I say sauntering, 
for the successful trout fisherman must “take it 
easy.” It does not answer to go tearing along 
a brook, as if you were bound to fish as many 
miles. of water as possible in a day; but the 
stream must be followed quietly and cautiously,. 
keeping the sun in your face, if possible, to avoid 
throwing your shadow on the water, and keep- 
ing yourself out of sight, as far as possible, for 
it is sight and not sound that scares the fish, al- 
though they are quite sensitive to any jar of the 

MR. UMBSTAETTER’S THREE KINGFISH OF 50, 41 
AND 38 POUNDS. 
water from nearby footsteps. Many a time have 
I fished a brook with an impatient companion, 
who would come out at the end of the day with 
more fingerlings than I had, while my catch, 
though fewer in number, would outweigh his. 
But the enjoyment is not all in the size of the 
basket; it is in the physical delight of the exer- 
cise, on a lovely day in May or June, now fol- 
lowing the brook down some steep wooded ra- 
vine, jumping from stone to stone; now through 
some open hill pasture, with swift rapids, and 
miniature waterfalls, or through some grassy 
meadow, where the brook, now narrow and deep, 
zigzags from side to side, till you can sometimes 
stand on some little promontory and take fish 
on three sides of you without changing your 
footing. 
It is the fashion of many fly-fishermen to sneer 
at the bait-fisher, and the humble and squirming 
angleworm, but I can tell them that it requires 
as much skill and experience to fish a mountain 
brook successfully with a worm as it does to cast 
a fly in open water. The fact is, that fly-fishing 
is impossible in most of our New England 
waters, the brooks are usually so overhung with 
alders and willows as to make it impracticable 
to cast a fly, or so crooked and narrow in the 
meadows as to make it very difficult, if the 
water is open; while in the woods there are too 
many branches to ensnare your back-cast, so that 
bait-fishing becomes a necessity. Then, as I have 
said, experience has something to do with it. 
The much laughed at country boy with his 
“beanpole and coarse line’ owes much of his suc- 
cess to his knowledge of the waters. He knows 
where the favorite haunts of the trout are, under 
what bank or root, or behind what stone they 
are pretty sure to be lying in wait, and from 
what side to approach them unseen. Like most 
other country boys, I began in the primitive 
manner, starting out with my line in one pocket 
and my bait-box in the other, and cutting an 
alder or birch pole on my way to the brook, and 
when I had done fishing, breaking off the top of 
the pole and winding up my line on it, with the 
hook stuck in the pith in the center of the stick, 
pocket it for the next day’s fun. 
My father, who had been. an angler in his 
youth, taught me how to snell my hooks before 
I ever saw silkworm gut, with a snell made of 
double and twisted sewing silk, which was much 
finer than the usual line, and which was attached 
to the hook with a series of clove-hitches, the 
flatted end of the shank of the old-fashioned 
hook keeping it from slipping off, and this 
was tied to the line and a piece of tea-lead wound 
round for a sinker. I soon found that the trout 
would often strike at the sinker, and discarded 
this for a split buckshot, which, in the course of 
time, I found was too heavy and reduced it to a 
single No. 2 shot. Then I began with very small 
hooks, but caught too many fingerlings, and finally 
discovered that any trout worth catching had a 
mouth big enough to take a No. 1 or 1-0 hook 
with plenty of bait on it, and came down to that 
as a finality. Then my first fish were “strung” 
on a willow or alder twig, and used to get fear- 
fully dried up before I got home, but I heard of 
creels, and begged a big old workbasket of one 
of my aunts, to which I fitted a cover, cut from 
a broad shingle with a slot in it to drop the fish 
through, and I was all right so far. When I 
was twelve or thirteen vears old an uncle gave 
me a slender bamboo tip, about nine feet long, 
and to the tip of this I tied a bone eyelet, such 
as were used in corsets, and put on three more 
down the length of the rod, drilled a hole into 
the butt, and put in a wire, on which a big thread 
spool was placed, which would hold six or eight 
feet of line, and I was fairly equipped. 
The reel (?) was not to play the fish with, but 
to enable me to let out line enough to throw 
across the stream in a broad shallow where the 
fish were sunning in early spring, or to shorten 
up to two or three feet, to poke through a hole 
in alders. So I came to be an angler, and got 
the reputation of being able to “catch trout out 
of a stone wall,” as an old friend, an ex-Gover- 
nor and Senator of our State once expressed it. 
Enough of my early experiences. Von W. 
Three Kingfish. 
Ir was the morning of the last day of January. 
A brisk northerly breeze was sending big tur- 
quoise rollers over the bar of Nassau Harbor 
and barring with white the deep purple sea out- 
side. The New York steamer lay at anchor in 
the roadstead,. and the stout pilotboat Kestrel 
tacked back and forth between the steamer and 
the white lighthouse on Hog Island Point, 
swinging over the long seas and scattering spray 
as she met one higher than ordinary. Over her 
quarters protruded two stiff rods, each carrying 
two hundred yards of 24-thread linen line, tipped 
with four feet of piano wire, armed with a hook 
measuring an inch and three-quarters across 
the bend, baited with seven-inch goggle-eyes, 

