
























































































50 
FOREST AND STREAM. 

[JULY 13, 
1907. 

~ 
a 
and a wise investment of $25 in pots, pans, bed- 
ding and fishing tackle will do the rest. For $20 
an eighteen-foot St. Lawrence skiff can be hired 
for the season, and then with a party of three or 
four the summer vacation can be made ideal. 
There should be no attempt to pitch the camp 
permanently in one place. There are too many 
islands pleading for closer intimacy; some gems 
of beauty, others bold, rugged rocks which 
threaten navigation and possess no_ intrinsic 
worth for man or beast; some untouched by visi- 
tors, and others “improved” so that they resemble 
formal gardens and nothing else; a few here and 
there so secluded that a residence of a month on 
them would not be discovered, and others stand- 
ing so conspicuously*in the main part of the river 
that the progressive vandals of commerce use 
them for advertising their wares to passing tour- 
ists. 
It has been said that the American side of the 
river, between Clayton and Alexandria Bay, has 
been ruined by “too much civilization.” This has 
an element of truth in it, and the succession of 
handsome cottages, bungalows and palatial hotels 
may oppress the visitor anxious to get away from 
all signs of the life which has surrounded him 
for a year. On the Canadian channel the scenery 
changes swiftly. Nature has here been left un- 
disturbed. Virgin forests clothe the islands to the 
water’s edge and invite the wandering seeker for 
rest and change. An hour’s row, however, from 
vit 
THE SENTINEL 
Photograph by 
almost any central point of the Thousand Islands 
will carry the vacationists to secluded 
that robins invade the tent in early morning and 
chipmunks boldly search the larder. 
A small island is preferable to a large one. 
Life on such a wooded rock in mid-stream is 
equal to that on a houseboat that may cost htn- 
dreds of dollars. There is no danger of in- 
trusion from outsiders, nothing but beautiful 
skies, green trees, and rippling water. One bathes 
in the river upon rising, fishes from a convenient 
rock while drying the skin in the sun, and cooks 
the breakfast on stones heaped together for an 
oven. There is no work for the day—nothing 
but idling, fishing, rowing and exploring. 
It may take a week to exhaust the novelty of 
one island. Then with tent packed away in the 
skiff, you drift idly down or row sturdily against 
the current until another place attracts and holds 
the fancy. If a tramp on land is desired there 
spots so 
are larger islands worth exploring—Grindstone, 
barren and grim in its bold outlines; Long or 
Wolfe Island, varied enough in its picturesque 
beauty to make a day’s walk enjoyable, and Wil- 
lesley, rough, mountainous and wooded. 
We crossed the latter when the camp .was 
pitched on a small island in Lake. Waterloo. It 
was’a tramp well worth the toil. Up and down a 


IN Stee Sa: 
George E. Walsh. 
series of high hills and rocks, across swamps, 
through virgin forests and fields of wild berries, 
with distant glimpes of cottages and parks. From 
the highest point we had a panoramic view of 
Gananoque on the Canadian shore twenty miles 
away; of Frontenac and Clayton on the American 
side; of Lake Waterloo, Alexandria Bay and 
Thousand Island Park to the east, and far to the 
west a glimmering vision of Cape Vincent and 
Kingston. For a suerte of an hour we feasted 
on this vision, and then satisfied our hunger and 
thirst with the blackberries which grew so pro- 
‘digally at our feet that a small city could have 
been supplied with fruit without materially dimin- 
ishing the crop, 
No one goes to the Thousand Islands without 
extolling fishing. But we were indifferent 
fishermen. We caught perch and bass when the 
mood seized us, but we did not waste time and 
patience hunting for them. When we rowed 
from camp to camp or visited neighboring islands 
we kept the regulation trolling hook over the 
stern. Our first fish was a pike twenty-nine inches 
jong, hauled in when we least expected it. In 
fact, all of our important catches were made in 
this way. 
“This day we a have pickerel,’ 
one of the party. And we rowed up 
the Narrows, across Eel Bay and back 
but we went to bed supperless, so «far 
were concerned. The following 
iis 
announced 
and down 
and forth; 
as pickerel 
morning it 
LAWRENCE RIVER. 
and we moved our tent to a higher and 
dryer rocky island. As usual our troll dangled 
astern, but we paid little attention to it until our 
boat grated on the sandy beach of another island. 
Then we hauled it in to keep the hook from 
tangling with the eel grass. There was a twitch 
and flutter on the other end, and then a pull and 
splash of distant water. Our pickerel, which we 
had missed when we hunted for him, was pulled 
ashore, and proved a record-breaker. 
When tired of rowing we sailed. A small sprit- 
sail rigged on a St. Lawrence skiff adds materially 
to the comfort and pleasure of the outing. It is a 
makeshift, however, and not a reliable means of 
propulsion. If running with the wind it serves 
its purpose nobly, but for tacking it is only an 
aggravation and a promoter of profanity. With- 
out a center-board the St. Lawrence skiff makes 
an excellent craft for rowing, but a poor apology 
for a sailor. You will but you slide off the 
wind about as fast as you go ahead. The river 
guides will tell you that you do not need a rud- 
der, and that even when sailing you can steer 
with the sail; but this means constantly shifting 
the ballast, which in this instance is the skip- 
per, and a feeble attempt to bring the skiff around 
at a speed probably equal to that of a scow loaded 
with coal or bricks. 
drizzled, 
go, 
_ and Stream: 
For $100 it is possible to pick up a “put- put” 
for the season. The range of activities is greatly 
increased by such means, and the whole length of 
the river can be explored at little expense. The 
put-put is nothing else than a St. Lawrence skiff 
equipped with a one, two, or three horse-power 
gasoline motor. Its draft is increased by six 
Penes thereby, and there are many little places 
which cannot be explored which are accessible to 
the skiffs without motor power. But taking 
everything into consideration, the power boat is 
a great institution for such a river as the St. 
Lawrence, and its kind is multiplying rapidly, so 
that rowing is likely to become a lost art. Next 
to this is the full-fledged motor-boat of eighteen 
to thirty feet in length and drawing only eighteen 
inches of water. These swift, saucy craft are 
like white-winged gulls on a sandy beach. They 
add to the variety of the water scene and increase 
the sum total of human happiness tenfold. 
Usually one is contented the first year on the St. 
Lawrence with a skiff. The second year he is 
not content without a put-put, and the third his 
ambition has soared higher. He must have a 
motor-boat to make happiness anywhere near 
complete. GEORGE ETHELBERT WALSH. 

“The Old Guard.” 
N. H., June 24.—Editor Forest 
You ask for a few lines of my ex- 
perience, to accompany a photo, for Forest 
AND STREAM, but I am much in the same oe 
dition as “Canning’s Knife Grinder,’ with 
story to tell.” I have spent many happy dave 
among the woods and waters, but it has been 
all in the pursuit of small fry. I never saw 
any large game alive at liberty, except deer in 
the close season, at Diamond Ponds and Con- 
necticut lakes when trout fishing in the spring 
or early summer, and the biggest animal I ever 
shot was a 27-pound porcupine, which I dropped 
out of a tall oak, mistaking him for a raccoon. 
I have once told the story of my first trout, 
when as a small boy, in a suit of blue denim, 
with my fish-line in one trouser pocket and my 
bait-box in the other, cutting a fish-pole from 
an alder swamp on the way. I went to a small 
brook, emptying into the millpond about a mile 
from my home, and caught an 8-inch trout the 
first time I dropped my hook in the water. I 
was so delighted that I ran straight home with 
it to my mother, without stopping for more. 
A young friend, then studying medicine with 
my father, saw the trout, took me back to the 
brook and gave me a first lesson in stream fish- 
ing, looking on while he worked up the brook. 
I did not follow it up, however, for two or three 
years, for the Connecticut River was nearer, 
and I had half a dozen companions of about my 
own age, with whom I fished for perch and 
dace in the river, which was then -well stocked 
with those fish, before the arrival of pike, which 
came down from Plymouth Ponds and Black 
River, where they had been planted from Lake 
Champlain about 1840. 
Two or three years later a friend brought me 
from Boston a couple of dozen Limerick hooks 
and a hank of gut, and as I had read 
“Christopher North,” I soon learned how to 
use my finer tackle, and with the instruction 
of the friend who gave me the hooks, took to 
the brooks again. There were half a dozen of 
these small brooks within a four-mile radius, and 
I followed them up diligently on Saturday 
afternoons, till I became quite a_ successful 
angler. 
For two or three years I carried my line in 
my pocket and cut a birch or alder pole on 
my way to the brook, stringing my fish on a 
willow crotch as I caught them, but then an 
uncle gave me a slender bamboo pole about nine 
feet long, and I decided on a more sportsman- 
like apparatus. I fitted up the rod with guides 
of brass wire, drilled a hole in the butt and put 
in a pin, on which I placed an old thread spool 
which would hold three or four yards of line, so 
I could wind it up short to poke under the 
bushes, or let out enough to cast over a wide 
place in the brook. Then one of my aunts gave 
me an old oblong work-basket, to which I fitted 
a cover from a thin shingle, and I was well 
armed and equipped for a country boy, and an 
CHARLESTOWN, 

