ry amount were soon heaped on the decks, at the feet of each
fisherman, the more careful of whom put them into baskets or barrels.
But in general they were thrown carelessly on the deck, with a string
passed through their gills to keep them from straying out of their
proper lots. When these bright fishes are lying the deck, it is curious
to watch them flushing and gasping there, with that singular, dubious
expression of mouth peculiar to fishes out of water, as if more struck
by the absence of that element than by their novel position among the
accessories of dry life. Now and then a blackfish was hauled in,--an
event greeted with a loud cheer from all parts of the boat. When a very
large one was announced, people came rushing from all quarters to see
it; but the greatest tribute to largeness in a fish that I remember
anywhere to have seen was the altered expression on the face of a baby
some six months old, whose features settled permanently down into the
collapse of imbecility, from the moment of the arrival on the upper deck
of a blackfish two feet long.

By this time the scene on the forecastle was quite a picture of the
Dutch school. Grouped everywhere among the fish and fishers were
matronly women and unbonneted damsels, most of them with handkerchiefs
tied upon their heads; for they had got over their sea-sickness, now,
and were coming by twos and threes from the saloon, to breathe a little
fresh air and look on at the sport. One pretty, Jewish-looking girl,
wrapped in a red and white shawl, was sitting on the big anchor near
the bows, and three or four others looked quite picturesque, as they
reclined on the heavy coils of the great cable. More central to the
picture than was at all advantageous to it sat our friend Raw Material,
with his head jammed recklessly into the capstan, abandoning himself
to his misery. For the inevitable malady had fallen upon him among the
first; and as he sat there, helpless and without hope, upon one of
those life-preserving stools that remind one, by their shape, of the
"properties" of Saturn in the mythology of old, he looked like Languor
on an hour-glass, timing the duration of Woe. All along the bulwarks
on both sides of the boat, men and boys were crowding upon each other,
casting out and hauling in their lines with unflagging spirit. Slim
city-children, blistered wholesomely as to their legs, from knee to
ankle, by the sun and the salt air, harnessed themselves to little heaps