But in the days of which I speak, Mosman's Bay was truly a lovely spot,
dear to the soul of the true fisherman. Our house--a great quadrangular,
one-storied stone building, with a courtyard in the centre--was the only
one within a radius of three miles. It had been built by convict hands
for a wealthy man, and had cost, with its grounds and magnificent
carriage drives, vineyards, and gardens, many thousand pounds. Then
the owner died, bankrupt, and for years it remained untenanted, the
recrudescent bush slowly enveloping its once highly cultivated lands,
and the deadly black snake, iguana, and 'possum harbouring among the
deserted outbuildings. But to us boys (when our father rented the place,
and the family settled down in it for a two years' sojourn) the lonely
house was a palace of beautiful imagination--and solid, delightful
fact, when we began to explore the surrounding bush, the deep, clear,
undisturbed waters of the bay, and a shallow lagoon, dry at low water,
at its head.

Across this lagoon, at the end near the deep water, a causeway of
stone had been built fifty-five years before (in 1820) as a means of
communication by road with Sydney. In the centre an opening had been
left, about twenty feet wide, and across this a wooden bridge had been
erected. It had decayed and vanished long, long years before we first
saw the place; but the trunk of a great ironbark tree now served equally
as well, and here, seated upon it as the tide began to flow in and
inundate the quarter-mile of dry sand beyond, we would watch the swarms
of fish passing in with the sweeping current.

First with the tide would come perhaps a school ot small blue and silver
gar-fish, their scarlet-tipped upper mandibles showing clear of the
water; then a thick, compact battalion of short, dumpy grey mullet,
eager to get up to the head of the lagoon to the fresh water which
all of their kind love; then communities of half a dozen of grey and
black-striped "black fish" would dart through to feed upon the green
weed which grew on the inner side of the stone causeway. Then a hideous,
evil-eyed "stingaree," with slowly-waving outspread flappers, and long,
whip-like tail, follows, intent upon the cockles and soft-shell clams
which he can so easily discover in the sand when he throws it upwards
and outwards by the fan-like action of his thin, leathery sides. Again
more mullet--big fellows these--with yellow, prehensile mouths, which
protrude and withdr