r a luscious-looking octopus tentacle) lying on the sand, the languid
grace of his course would cease, the broad, many-masted dorsal fin
become erect, and he would come to a dead stop, his bright, eager eye
bent on the prize before him. Was it a delusion and a snare? No!
How could it be? No treacherous line was there--only the beautiful
shimmering scales of a delicious silvery-sided young mullet, lying dead,
with a thin coating of current-drifted sand upon it. He darts forward,
and in another instant the hook is struck deep into the tough grizzle
of his white throat; the line is as taut as a steel wire, and he is
straining every ounce of his fighting six or eight pounds' weight to
head seawards into deep water.

Slowly and steadily with him, else his many brothers will take alarm,
and the rest of the carefully laid baits will be left to become the prey
of small "flatheads," or greedy, blue-legged spidery crabs. Once his
head is turned, providing he is well hooked, he is safe, and although it
may take you ten minutes ere you haul him into such shallow water that
he cannot swim upright, and he falls over upon his broad, noble side,
and slides out upon the sand, it is a ten minutes of joy unalloyed to
the youthful fisherman who takes no heed of two other lines as taut as
his own, and only prays softly to himself that his may be the biggest
fish of the three.

Generally, we managed to get a fish upon every one of the ten or twelve
lines we set in this manner, and as we always used short, stout-shanked
hooks of the best make, we rarely lost one. On one occasion, however, a
ten-foot sawfish seized one of our baits, and then another and another,
and in five minutes the brute had entangled himself amongst the rest of
the lines so thoroughly that our old convict boatman, who was watching
us from his hut, yelled out, as he saw the creature's serrated snout
raised high out of the water as it lashed its long, sinuous tail to and
fro, to "play him" till he "druv an iron into it." He thought it was a
whale of some sort, and, jumping into a dinghy, he pulled out towards
it, just in time to see our stout lines part one after another, and the
"sawfish" sail off none the worse for a few miserable hooks in his jaws
and a hundred fathoms of stout fishing lines encircling his body.

This old Bill Duggan--he had "done" twenty-one years in that abode
of horror, Port Arthur in Tasmania, for a variegated assortment of
crimes--always took a de