said the
boy. "I'm sure I've read of their landing on the decks of vessels!"

"They do," was the answer; "they are attracted by the glare of the
lights and fall on board. But that is generally on sailing vessels with
a low freeboard. You don't often hear of flying-fish falling on the deck
of a modern liner, and in the few cases in which they have, it has been
because they happened to come out of the water with a rush against a
slant of wind which carried them up twenty or thirty feet. They go with
an awful force, and I knew an angler once who was pitched head first
overboard by a flying-fish, and was nearly drowned before his boatman
could get him aboard. He had been struck square between the shoulders
and the blow had stunned him for the moment."

"Suppose a chap got hit by a tuna?" queried the boy.

"That's less likely," the father answered, "because, you see, the tuna
comes nearly straight up and down; he leaps, he doesn't skim."

"Zere was one went t'rough a boat last season, Major Dare," the boatman
interjected. "It was late in ze year, after you had gone, I t'ink,
sair."

"Had it been hooked?" asked Colin.

"No, sair," the boatman answered; "tuna don't leap after zey are hooked.
It was when zey were chasing a school, just like this."

"You're thinking of the tarpon, Colin," his father said; "it leaps
wildly after it has been hooked. The tuna, although a wonderful leaper,
hardly ever rises from the water after it is fast to the line. But the
tarpon is a vicious fighter. A couple of years ago a boat was found
drifting in the Galveston fishing-ground off Texas, with a dead angler
and a dead tarpon. The fish had been hooked and had tried to leap over
the boat, striking the angler and breaking his neck, then had fallen
into the boat itself and had not been able to get out."

"There's some excitement to fishing when it's like that!" Colin
commented.

"It's as good as big-game hunting any day, I think," his father
answered; "and you don't have to travel for weeks out of civilization
to find it. Well, now, we'll give you a chance to show how much of the
angler you've got in you."

[Illustration: WHERE THE BIG TUNA WAS CAUGHT.

The Bay and City of Avalon, Santa Catalina Islands, Cal., the most
famous sport-fishing centre in the world.

_By permission of Mr. Chas. Fredk. Holder._]

[Illustration: THE LARGEST SUNFISH ON RECORD.

Estimated at over 2500 pounds, caught off Avalon, Santa Catalina.

_Courtesy