The Warwickshire Herald. — 1893-03-30 (Birmingham, West Midlands, England)

SPORT IN FLORIDA.  It requires • stern sportsman to do much quail shooting in Florida, srstes a Globe correspondent from that country. It Is s`case of long, dusty driving through interminabie pine woods; then of very hot walking and very difficult shooting, with an incidental affair with • moccasin snake or &rattler; and then of another big drive home by quickly failing light, during which you will probably lose your way two or three times. Life in the country in Florida is a very mixed pleasure. The swamps are innumerable. Where it is not swamp-land it is pine-land for scores and scores of miles, and Heaven knows what is the monotony of millicns upon millions of pines. The roads are all sandy and dusty—mere waggon tracks through the woods; hsrseback is the only method by which you can get much pleasure out of them. Then, if you plunge on foot into the woods, you will immediately make the acquaintance of the red spider of Florida, • tiny little haunter of every piece of scrub, which bites like the very old Nick, and is quite impossible to avoid except by a complicated arrangement of gaiters. Add to these country charms the swarms of snakes which infest the country, and you have a notion of the pleasures of a woodland walk in Florida. The moccasin snake is tor me a .now  acquaintance and a deadly; but my old friend, tit.- rattlesnake, is so big here that Ifs cousins in California and even in Montana are pigmies in cornparison. But the great thing to do in Florida is to flu. This is • fisherman's paradise. The waters, salt or flesh, swarm with fins. Bass and trout, red snapper and grey mullet, are some of the best fish of the neighbourhood; but, of course, the king of all, from the sporting, not eating, point of view, is the tarpon, the silver king. Tarpon fishing has been well written up in the magazines, and mest people know now that the fish runs to a length of about 6ft. 6in. (with a minimum of about 51t.), and will weigh some 150Ib. ; that it has a huge. scaled armour of silvery whiteness; and that it will provide more hard work for the fishernyin than the biggest salmon on the Spey. I will Merely refer here to that form of it which is generally enjoyed by the Northern visitor to Florida, who thinks that it is a matter of duty to mach a tarpon. At Punts Gorda or Punta Rassa he will find plenty of boatmen anxious to show him the sport and to conduct him to likely ground. He has secured his fishing outfit; he is also recommended by the experienced to provide himself with an umbrella, an easy chair, and a good novel. With these he goes out into the Gulf of Mexico. The line is baited and thrown out, and, with an occasional glance at the situation, our friensl gets through the day and the best part of his novel. The tarpon are "not biting to-day." Another day repeats the experience, and another, and yet an tier. By the end of the week, perhaps, be gets a bit,-, or rather tho tarpon does, cutting the hook oif clean with his sharp teeth. It is the same story for another week, if the fisherman is ;till persistent. end then a second tarpon will spun or, consent for form's sake to lie hooked, gc .)ff with almighty runs and leaps, and break the in. ixperienced one's tackle with the ease of a pro. eonSl s' one 111A11. This generally ends the :arpon iislimg—at leas.; it did in the case of the ;,nitleinan who gave me some such account as this his own expel Once as a tarpon amateur.  The body of a young man named Cook, an employé of the Great Western Railway Company, ilas [well found in the river at Taunton.  Sarah Ann Crisp, wife of a railway porter, re. -siding at Afariborovh-road, Upper Holloway, ate codfish for breakfast. She was seized with v.aniting and died. Ihtelligence has reached Limerick that Constable Lonerghan, stationed at Castletown, had committed suicide by blowing hie brains out with • vide. He had been suffering from depression.