The
admiral of a fishing-fleet is a great man. All is in his hands. He
chooses the grounds. Our admiral, it was whispered to me, was the wizard
of the north. The abundant fish-pastures were revealed to him in his
dreams. It was my last evening on the Bank. The day had been
wonderfully fine for winter and a sea that is notoriously evil. At
twilight the wind dropped, the heave of the waters decreased. The
scattered fleet, gliding through the hush, carried red, green, and white
planets. The ships which lay in the western glow were black and simple
shapes. Those to the east of us were remarkable with a chromatic
prominence, and you thought, while watching them, that till that moment
you had not really seen them. Presently the moon cleared the edge of the
sea, a segment of frozen light, and moored to our stern with a quivering,
ghostly line.

Coloured rockets sailed upwards from the admiral when he changed his mind
and his course, and then the city of mobile streets altered its plan, and
rewove its constellation. At midnight white flares burned forward on all
the boats. The trawls were to be hauled. Our steam-winch began to bang
its cogs in the heavy work of lifting the net. All hands assembled to
see what would be our luck. The light sent a silver lane through the
night, and men broke through the black walls of that brilliant separation
of the darkness, and vanished on the other side. Leaning overside, I
could see the pocket of our trawl drawing near, still some fathoms deep,
a phosphorescent and flashing cloud. It came inboard, and was suspended
over the deck, a bulging mass, its bottom was unfastened, and out gushed
our catch, slithering over the deck, convulsive in the scuppers. The
mass of blubber and plasm pulsed with an elfish glow.

9

We were homeward bound. The flat sea was dazzling with reflected
sunshine, and a shade had to be erected over the binnacle for the man at
the wheel. It might have been June, yet we had but few days to
Christmas. The noon ceiling was a frail blue, where gauze was suspended
in motionless loops and folds. The track of the sun was incandescent
silver. A few sailing vessels idled in the North Channel, their sails
slack; but we could not see a steamer in what is one of the world's
busiest fairways. We ran on a level keel, and there was no movement but
the tremor of the engines. We should catch the tide at the Shipwash, and
go up on it to Billingsgate and be hom