tened their lines securely, baiting each alternate hook
with mutton and worms. I declared this was too cockney a method of
fishing, and selected a tall slender flax-stick, the stalk of last
year's spike of red honey-filled blossoms, and to this extempore rod I
fastened my line and bait. When one considers that the old whalers were
accustomed to use ropes made in the rudest fashion, from the fibre of
this very plant, in their deep-sea fishing for very big prey, it is
not surprising that we found it sufficiently strong for our purpose. I
picked out, therefore, a comfortable spot,--that is to say, well in the
centre of a young flax-bush, whose satiny leaves made the most elastic
cushions around me; with my flax-stick held out over what was supposed
to be a favourite haunt of the eels, and with Nettle asleep at my feet
and a warm shawl close to my hand, prepared for my vigil. "Don't speak
or move," were the gentlemen's last words: "the eels are all eyes and
ears at this hour; they can almost hear you breathe." Each man then took
up his position a few hundred yards away from me, so that I felt, to all
intents and purposes, absolutely alone. I am "free to confess," as our
American cousins say, that it was a very eerie sensation. It was now
past ten o'clock; the darkness was intense, and the silence as deep as
the darkness.

Hot as the day had been, the night air felt chill, and a heavy dew
began to fall, showing me the wisdom of substituting woollen for cotton
garments. I could see the dim outlines of the high hills, which shut in
our happy valley on all sides, and the smell of the freshly-turned earth
of a paddock near the house, which was in process of being broken up
for English grass, came stealing towards me on the silent air. The
melancholy cry of a bittern, or the shrill wail of the weka, startled
me from time to time, but there was no other sound to break the eternal
silence.

As I waited and watched, I thought, as every one must surely think,
with strange paradoxical feelings, of one's own utter insignificance in
creation, mingled with the delightful consciousness of our individual
importance in the eyes of the Maker and Father of all. An atom among
worlds, as one feels, sitting there at such an hour and in such a spot,
still we remember with love and pride, that not a hair of our head falls
to the ground unnoticed by an Infinite Love and an Eternal Providence.
The soul tries to fly into the boundless regions of spa