his suit, your gunner has his; why may not the archer affect a peculiar garb? He does. It consists of low-legged jack-boots, corduroy breeches, a green-checked hickory shirt, and a broad-brimmed, light, soft felt hat. If the weather is chilly or cold, a heavy flannel shirt may be worn under the hickory, or a close-fitting jacket may be put on over it. The main object is to keep your clothes down to the minimum in weight, and at the same time have no skirts or lappels to hinder your shooting.

Florida was the first grand hunting-ground visited by my brother and myself. After a year or two of training under Williams and a great deal of hunting among the hills and along the fine streams of North Georgia had made real archers of us, we spent three winters there, shooting over some of the finest water and land region for sporting to be found in the world. My note-books are full of incidents, some of which are fresh to me as I read them over. But I cannot do more here than pick out two or three of the most striking. The reader must not expect to get even a glimpse of the dark side. One does not care to write or read about failures, disappointments, vexatious delays, worrying accidents and ill-luck generally, these things come frequently to every sportsman. Some days he can find no game,-some days he finds everything and can hit nothing,sometimes he breaks a bow, sometimes he loses all his arrows. The successful day-the "brilliant shot"-the exciting chase ending in capture-the long-range hit when I expected to miss-these are all down in my field-books, along with rough drawings of the birds, curious plants, strange insects, notable trees, and whatever happened to strike me as worth future thought.

prouder or happier. A week or two of daily practice in good hare-cover will get you well up toward successful shooting at this game; then you will be ready for quail and pheasant. These birds are so similar in their habits that to know one is to be pretty well acquainted with the other. You hunt them on damp, cloudy days with a very small dog, to escape which they fly up and alight on the lower limbs of trees and hedge shrubs or the stakes of worm fences. This gives you rare sport, and shot by shot you knock down your birds.

Thus you gradually advance in the science and art of archery till you become a "crack shot," able to match any ordinary rifleman at forty yards. I can now leave you and proceed to give some notes on a few of the many hunting-grounds I have shot over with the long-bow. But first a word about the dress of a wild-wood archer. Your angler has

Our party in Florida consisted of three,

did not care to follow them with only a few minutes of day-time to spare. I had come prepared for them now, and looking about for a landing-place, I drew the canoe into a re-entrant angle of the shore, and secured it just as the sun of a semi-tropical winter day made glorious all the points of the flat verdurous landscape. Strapping on my quiver and stringing my bow, I plunged into the marshy wood where vines, moss, low-hanging boughs, tufts of palmetto and saw-palm made progress at times a matter

a shot of which I have some hesitancy in speaking, so sure am I that its history must appear apocryphal, and I have no means of proving its truth. Our tent was pitched in a clump of palmetto-trees, on a low jut of shore overlooking the frith of a lagoon of the river. A visiting party, composed of Mr. Willis Lloyd Parker and friends, of London, England, had just left us, making us a parting present of five bottles of pale sherry; so we planned to have a quiet dinner to the memory of our guests. Will was to go down the river for wild-fowl, while I pushed up the lagoon in a canoe, hoping to get a young turkey or two from a flock I had seen a few days before on a sort of island. Cæsar remained at the tent to take care of things. An hour of leisurely pulling over a still, dead sheet of dark water brought me to where the lagoon forks at a sharp angle, flowing on either side of a densely wooded tongue of land, to where, a mile away, a barely perceptible shallow slough runs across from prong to prong, thus making a triangular island, barely separated from the main-land by this slough, over which deer or turkey could easily pass at low tide. I had caught sight of a latehatched brood of turkey just at twilight one evening as I was passing this point, but they turned and ran into a thicket, and I

of great labor, and attended with so much noise that such a thing as getting near a turkey was impossible. Farther in, however, a broad glade or meadow of low, coarse grass opened before me, on the opposite rim of which I saw the birds skulking quietly along far beyond bow-shot. The only feasible method of approach was to slip around the edge of the glade just inside the fringe of cover. To do this involved time and patient toil, but your archer is used to. such tedious strategy. Foot by foot, rod by rod, stealthily as a cat, I made my way, till at length I came to a break in the cover, to pass which would be sure to expose me to the birds. They were fully one hundred and fifty yards away, moving slowly, close together, in a direction "quartering" to me. A few more steps, and they would be in the jungle. I must have a shot. My only chance was to risk the luck of a long-range flight at them, so I braced myself for a steady pull, elevated my bow-arm, drew to my ear, and let go a shaft. At the sound of the recoil of my weapon, the turkeys stopped, lifted their heads, and began that sharp cry of "Pit,-pit!" so well known to sportsmen. Meantime, my arrow went singing through the elongated parabola of its flight. I watched it with that fixed eagerness which always attends a moment of intense

suspense. A little breeze was blowing, but it did not seem to affect the course of the shaft. Swiftly it swept down, and I saw the feathers shatter out from the back of one of the turkeys, which tried to rise, but could not. It was a "solid hit," as we term it, and the bird was done for. The others of the flock took rapidly to wing, and soon curved into cover. This is the longest successful bowshot we have recorded. It must be noted, however, that I did not shoot at any particular bird, but at the flock, and of course "much good luck" was a strong element in influencing the result.*

On approaching my turkey, I found it pierced through the spine and lungs, quite dead. I spent an hour or two after this beating about the island, but saw no more of the flock. Three deer got up before me, and in following them, I passed around an arm of the lagoon. Before I was aware of it, I had betangled myself in a jungle, from which it took me two hours more to extricate myself, and it was two o'clock when I reached my canoe. Feeling pretty hungry, I did not dally much in returning to the tent. When I reached it, however, Cæsar was not there, and no preparations for dinner were visible. I lay down to smoke and rest. In a few minutes Will came in, tired too, but Cæsar could not be heard from, though we called him in no gentle way. Finally, we had to make a fire and prepare the dinner ourselves. We roasted the turkey, which, being only about half-grown, cooked easily, and Will made some excellent coffee. We had sailor's biscuit, some pickles, onions, canned fruit, and then the wine; but when we came to look for the last-named article, not a bottle could be found! O, Cæsar, what unfeeling treachery! We understood the matter now, and a little search discovered him lying under a palmetto-tree, sleeping the sleep of the very drunk. By his side were all the bottles, two of them nearly empty! We threatened to trounce him roundly when he got sober, but that great black, appealing face repelled our anger, and we forgave him. I cannot think of camp life in Florida

While on the subject of long shots, I must give to Captain H. H. Talbott, of our Crawfordsville (Indiana) Archery Club, the credit of one of the fairest and finest, which was made in the presence of several witnesses. He hit a golden-winged woodpecker, a bird not quite so large as a dove, at a measured distance of seventy-nine yards. This, of course, is a better record than mine above given.

CÆSAR.

found such sport, such exercise, such exhilarating pastime and recreation, as he could have found had he been an accomplished archer. Much of our time there was spent heron-shooting, and every sportsman knows what a wary, wild, almost unapproachable bird the heron is. Let me here say that woodcraft is probably the most important and most difficult part of all an archer's training. To be a successful hunter with the bow, you must know perfectly all the habits of your game; you must be stealthy and sly as an Indian, not the least excitable, patient, watchful, storing up in your memory every item of experience; and, above all, you must be keen-sighted and steady of hand. For to get within good bow-shot of your game is of the first value, and scarcely second to this is the power of instantly centering all your faculties in the act of shooting.

To show how a perfectly trained archer manages his approach to very wary game under circumstances of extreme difficulty, let me describe how Will worked his way to within forty yards of a snowy heron. The great white bird was sitting on the top of an old cypress-stump about twenty yards out in a shallow pond, and we were lying on a green tussock six hundred yards away. We had been talking about the great difficulty of getting a shot at him, and, finally, one of us remarked that it would be evidence of the very highest skill if a hunter should show himself able to outwit that old heron, and get within fair shooting distance of him.

along from one of these tufts to another, which would have been rapid enough and quite easy had the tufts been anything like in a row leading toward the bird; but this was not the case. Sometimes a space had to be passed, in full view of the heron, where nothing but the thin grass offered any cover. Here Will's patience and skill were put to strongest test. Lying flat in the grass, face downward, he drew himself forward inch by inch (so slowly that his motion was hardly discernible), till a weed-tuft would hide him from the game, then he would slip rapidly up to the tuft and repeat the process of slow, painful progress to another. Cæsar and I watched alternately the archer and the bird. Now and then the latter would stretch out its wings and shake them a little, or lift up its head to the full extent of its long neck; but the movements were not those of fright. As Will neared his game his motions became still more slow and careful. He zigzagged back and forth from tuft to tuft, gaining only a few feet of distance for many yards of

creeping. But he was getting the space quite narrow between him and the heron. Presently it only remained for him to reach another tuft. No cat ever crept as he did. Line by line he seemed to move, scarcely faster than the hand of a clock, and at last we saw him draw himself up behind the tall weeds. For a few moments he rubbed his arms to relieve them of their weariness, then he slipped an arrow from his quiver, nocked it on the string, and moved to one side of the tuft to get a view of his bird. I was watching his movements through a good glass, and I felt my nerves tingle with the excitement of expectancy. All at once he I drew and shot. Down came the heron impaled on the shaft, his great wings spread out and his long neck doubled under him! Cæsar and I leaped to our feet and yelled with delight. Will came trudging back carrying his bird, proud, tired, victorious: "champion of the world," sure enough.

Shooting fish might seem to be poor sport, but in the clear spring-streams of North Georgia we have had some lively work and right royal fun killing bass (" trout," the people call them there) with the bow and arrow. Will was the first to attempt this, and after two hours sport he brought in a string of five or six bass, one of them weighing over four pounds. They were certainly the most toothsome fish I ever ate, their flavor being equal to the famed pompano, while their flesh seemed firmer and juicier. After this, "trout" shooting became a favorite change with us when tired of other sport or when other game did not offer. No disciple of Izaak Walton need fly into a passion at this, for in the clear springstreams of North Georgia no bass would ever take either fly or minnow for me, though in the rivers and brooks they are lively enough game for the hook. In the Oothcaloga, a small mill-stream near Calhoun, I caught a string of sixteen pounds in less than two hours, but in the Cranetah and Big-Spring streams they will not rise or strike at all.

It is a long step from Florida to the Kankakee region of Illinois and Indiana ; but there are times when the sportsman may take the step with profit to himself. In the spring and fall this region is one of the finest grounds for mallard, teal, woodduck and geese to be found in the United States. I need not say to a sportsman that the mallard is a king's own bird for the table. The canvas-back does not surpass it. I have shot corn-fed mallards whose