Cobb's Island

THERE are about twenty-five sportsmen upon the island, mostly hailing from Baltimore and Virginia. It has been very warm, and to those enthusiastic Nimrods who have sat for five hours in the blinding glare of an August sun waiting for birds to circle around the decoys, they ought to know what hot weather means. In such a sun the mercury must bubble and the glass become mallable, and certainly the gun barrel gets so hot that one has to use a handkerchief when clasping it, and there seems a positive danger in the premature explosion of the cartridge by the hot barrels.

Well, about the luck, the islanders say it's "middling," but the truth is it is a failure, and there are but few birds; the willet, curlew and yellow legs are not one-fourth what they were in years past. For example, a dozen sportsmen go out and the bag will average as follows: One will have twenty birds, five will have ten, four will have a half dozen apiece, and one will not have fired off his gun, and each one waiting over his decoys half the day.

Thinking that the incessant fusilade around Cobb's Island had driven off the birds from this immediate cicintiy, I in company with Mr. Sanford Spady and Captain George Hopkins, of the coast guard, both good men and true, went over to Cape Charles or Smith Island, as it is called, about twenty miles from here, where there has been no shooting this summer and we had the whole field to ourselves, and the result was that we did not get thirty birds. They are scarce, very scarce, and what the reason is I cannot tell unless it is the heavenly powers of the breech-loader that is thinning them out rapidly.

Mr. Goffigon, the keeper of the lighthouse, reports but few birds.

This much I can say about Smith's Island. If the birds are as plentiful as the mosquitoes, there would be the finest bird shooting in the world. Talk about Jersey mosquitoes, why they can't hold a candle to their Cape Charles relatives, who are as large as humming birds and have feathers in their tails. Bite! I should think so. They can reach the meat through thick corduroy breeches. Captain Hitchings had two pair of Boyton's india-rubber suits hanging in the station house, and the mosquitoes, thinking there was a man inside, literally perforated them, and the inspectors condemned them the other day as being utterly unfit for wear. They have to rub the house pigs with pennyroyal oil every evening to keep them from being eaten up alive, and dare not shear the sheep for fear of the same fate.

Common netting is no protection, but iron wire is used instead, and in the night time the noise of their teeth against this neeting sounds like the knawing of thousands of rats, and, by the way, there isn't a rodent on the island; the mosquitoes have eaten them all up. They come out so heavy some evenings that all hands on the island climb to the top of the light house for protection, and manage to fight the night through.

Mosquitoes! Well, send your enemy to Cape Charles for summer shooting, and then remember him in your prayers.

CHASSEUR.

COBB'S ISLAND, Va., Aug. 8, 1882.