The other variety of pickerel is Esox americanus, the banded pickerel, known hereabouts mainly as brook pickerel, because he loves grassy streams. But the brook pickerel frequents the ponds as well, loving best those of weedy bottoms and shores and slight depth. He is a slim, little green fellow, usually not over a foot long and his dark banded sides easily distinguish him from the smaller specimens of his reticulated neighbor. The brook pickerel is found only east of the Allegheny Mountains, from Massachusetts to Florida while the pond pickerel is found from middle Maine to Florida, and west to Louisiana and Arkansas. In spring the pond pickerel goes up into the ready margins as far even as the brook pickerel will and often I see him in water so shallow that his back fin sticks up, looking like the sail of a miniature Chinese junk. There he seeks the lovely little coppery swamp tree-frogs that are but an inch long and look like talismans carved from metal. These are his tidbits, but he will take most anything alive that is small enough for him to swallow, and when in winter he retires to the warmer layers of water next the pond bottom, his omnivorous appetite in a large measure goes with him. Hence the fishermen use many varieties of small fish for bait, all with some success. In the spring nothing else is quite so good as this tiny, swamp tree-frog. In the winter in the majority of cases the little silvery minnow known as "shiner" is best of all. Yet, the fishermen will tell you, on some ponds the mummy-chogs which, I take it, is the still surviving Indian name for the killi-fish, are to be most esteemed as bait, and I have found fishermen fishing with young perch and dace and other hard-scaled fish, though I believe with indifferent success, nor did the fishermen themselves look to be the real thing. I fancy that people had seen these folk that fished with young perch come to the pond, perhaps even knew them by name and where they lived, and that the bait had been bought in a city market where they even keep young mud-fish for sale as bait to the unsuspecting, and will assure them that these are the young of dog-fish and are particularly alluring. But the fishermen, the real fishermen, know better.