ke
playing with fire, and I think there are very, very few states on this
earth wherein it would be wise or safe to try it. As a wise friend once
remarked to me, "Give some men a hinch, and they'll always try to take a
hell." In Vermont, however, the situation is kept so well in hand we may
be sure that at the right moment the law providing for the decrease of
the number of does will be repealed.

HIPPOPOTAMI AND ANTELOPES.--Last year a bill was introduced in the lower
House of Congress proposing to provide funds for the introduction into
certain southern states of various animals from Africa, especially
hippopotami and African antelopes. The former were proposed partly for
the purpose of ridding navigation of the water hyacinths that now are
choking many of the streams of Louisiana and Mississippi. The antelopes
were to be acclimatized as a food supply for the people at large.

This measure well illustrates the prevailing disposition of the American
people to-day,--to ignore and destroy their own valuable natural stock
of wild birds and mammals, and when they have completed their war of
extermination, reach out to foreign countries for foreign species.
Instead of preserving the deer of the South, the South reaches out for
the utterly impossible antelopes of Africa, and the preposterous
hippopotamus. The North joyously exterminates her quail and ruffed
grouse, and goes to Europe for the Hungarian partridge. That partridge
is a failure here, and I am _heartily glad of it_, on the ground that
the exterminators of our native species do not deserve success in their
efforts to displace our finest native species with others from abroad.

The hippo-antelope proposition is a climax of absurdity, in proposing
the replacing of valuable native game with impossible foreign species.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXV

LAW AND SENTIMENT AS FACTORS IN PRESERVATION

There is grave danger that through ignorance of the true character of
about 80 per cent of the men and boys who shoot wild creatures, a great
wrong will be done the latter. Let us not make a fatal mistake.

After more than thirty years of observation among all kinds of
sportsmen, hunters and gunners, I am convinced that it is utterly futile
and deadly dangerous to rely on humane, high-class sentiment to diminish
the slaughter of wild things by game-hogs and pot-hunters.

In some respects, the term "game-hog" is a rude, rough word; but it i