[V. MOOSE HORNS.]
Few and far between are the traces of Moose horns in Pennsylvania. But they do exist, and probably in some remote farmhouse garret a set or two are still to be found. The writer, when engaged in antiquarian studies along the Blue Mountains accidentally learned of the last known pair. They hung for many years above the front door of Heller's stone tavern, near the Wind Gap, in Northampton County, once the famous pathway of the Moose from Northern to Southerly regions. It was related that Marks John Biddle, a celebrated lawyer of Reading, while stopping at this tavern, when on a horseback journey, noticed the horns, and asked about them of the landlord. Old Jacob Heller obliged his guest by taking them down and letting him measure them. They had a width of 78-1/2 inches and weighed a trifle over 91 pounds. Dr. Hornaday in his "American Natural History" tells of a Moose killed in the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska, in 1903, the antlers and skull of which weighed 93-1/2 pounds. The Record Moose Horns in the Field Columbian Museum, Chicago, weigh about 92 pounds. This Record Moose was taken in the Kenai Peninsula in 1899. The late Captain F. C. Selous (recently killed in battle in British East Africa) stated that the antlers of a Moose which he killed on the McMillan River, Canada, in 1904 had a spread of 66-1/2 inches and weighed 75 pounds.
JOHN Q. DYCE (1830-1904),
A Hunter Who Delighted to Tell of the Times When Moose Were Visitors to the Wilds of the Keystone State.