s were not entirely to my liking.

While I did not have time to look up the game or rather the
fur-bearers as thoroughly as I would have liked to, yet I saw
considerable signs of mink and coon and was told that there were
quite a number of otter in that section on some of the streams. From
Pickens I bought a ticket to Columbus, Ohio, where I intended to stop
over a day and call on the editor of the greatest of sporting
magazines, _Hunter-Trader-Trapper,_ but when I got to Columbus my
courage failed. I was afraid that the editor would be too busy
pushing the quill to bother with a lone trapper, so concluded to
hasten back to old Potter, where chills, jiggers, ticks, fleas and
poisonous snakes are unknown, and where the cold, sparkling spring
water flows from the mountain side to your very door. Say, boys, you
may think that I am stuck on the water question. Well, I am, and I
have good cause to me. Only for spring water, I should not have been
able to have made the journey which I am writing of.

For the past two years, barring the time I was south, I have drank
from four to six quarts of cold spring water every twenty-four hours.
I have got more relief from rheumatism than I ever did from all the
rheumatism remedies that I ever knew of, and I have tried the most of
them. I used all the salt in my food that I could to aid the desire
for water, and took six drops of oil of wintergreen three times a
day. Now, if any of the old trappers have rheumatism and the good
spring water, I ask you to try it.

Well, after getting back home and resting a few days and the frost
began to hit the pumpkin vine, I began to feel as I imagined that the
wild goose does about their migratory time. At least I felt as though
I should fly if I did not get into the woods. We were having splendid
weather for camping, and the warm, dry, sunny days afforded splendid
weather for bee hunting, and after the trap and gun then my delight
is to trail the honey bee to his den tree.

One day when a young man called on me and said that he would give me
an interest in a "goose pasture" to go out in the woods and camp, I
was interested. Smoky Jim (that is his nickname) although his name is
Charles Earl, and there is nothing smoky about Charley except his
pipe, which he is very fond of, too much so, I think, for so young a
man. Well, when Charley said that he would like to go and camp out in
the woods, I was practically as good as gone. I knew Smoky to be a