The daily morning journal and courier., 1899-01-16

| do it. one of them said to me after see
 ing me dive into a river pool and swim
 around for pastime. Yer might strike
 plumb on a gar down at the bottom,
 well, suppose I did, What then?
 I said.
 | What then?" he said after me. with
 a touch of wonder in his tone at my l foolhardiness. Let him git a grip on
 yer toe and a turn of his tail round a root or a rock what would yer do? I'll I tell yer; yer'd stay down thar"
 Tt capped the climax with the na- | tives when having captured a Sarfish | that had worked his way from the river
 LID a ditch to q puddle where I found
 him stranded in the morning. l had him served for breakfast. The meat and
 bones were much like those of an eol, and we found the dish very palatable;
 but the idea of eating garfish quite oyercame one of the Hatfields whom we
 invited to the meal. He did not know at first whether to thank us or be of- tended.
 No" he said at last, T couldn't
 quite go gar I'd have to practice a while on fried rattlesnakes before l
 could git ter stomach it. Amt yer
 afraid it'll pizen yer!'
 'TThe report of our unaccountable
 taste in fish went up and down the river and back into the mountains. Men and
 women came miles to look at us, and
 for the rest of our stay in the region
 we were talked of and wondered at as the men who ate gar. An act Of cannl- balism could hardly have made great CT sensation or excited more comment.
 "One cause for the natives antipathy and superstitious fear of the gartish IS his habit of turning up unaccountably in the most unexpected places. Some times it is in a we'll that he appears, sometimes in a spring or puddle remote from the river To find four-foot gar fish snakily confronting you from wayside pool which had been dry land when you passed it the week before IS apt to strike you as queer ana gfue- some, even If you are far less ignorant and superstitious than the people who dwell in the Hatfield-McCoy region It is probable that the garfish, being a bold and adventurous as well as ever hungry fish, which, as was said of the o,d light t-draught river steamboats, can Gu where IH6TG Is q dSN, o''ss' A''"' the springs and puddlas oy Following un the rivulets that overflow from them down into the river dufng rains, rms Is a more reasonable theory than the To- cal one that they coE,a dowa from lhe sky with the rain, or work their way up from mysterious depths in the earth. TTheir un oked for appearance in We'!s, ,eien followed by q disappearance as sudden, my be accounted for by the sublcrraneai. wattr-courses SD common in this limestone region
 Such emigration co i'd not often be made in the way one was which was witnessed by our entira party. We were sitting at our noon ?dav meal on the river bank when fishhawis rose from the water few hundra ] feet below us, carrying in his talons q yood-s;el gar fish. The fish was a heavs load for the hawk anyway, and with his Wrthins and fighting he kept the bird from get ting far above the ground. With great effort the hawk cleared the tops of the trees along the river, but coming to a clear place beyond the garflsh twisted himself somehow into the hawks wings so as to cripple their motion, and bird and fish went down, locked together, to the ground. All of us ran over to see the outcome of the affair. In the clear ing there had once been brickyard, and a big hole 200 feet across, where clay had been dug out, was now filled with water. Just as we came in sight of it the hawk, looking as if he had been having a hard time, fiuttered up the ba nk of this mud pond and stood shak- ing his feathers at the edge, He flew into a tree as we came near and perch ed there, very wet and ruffled, with an air of deep lejection, As luck would have it, he had fallen with his prey into the mud pond where the garfish now lying securely in it's depths, no doubt was indulging in his sixteen inch-round chuckle over the way he had crcumvented the hawk. "-The New York Sun.