and fretted, as if weary with their efforts at trying to wash it down.
The birds squealed and hissed, and now and then one uttered a doleful
wail as it swept here and there, showing its pearly grey breast and the
delicate white feathers beneath its wings.

"Do you ever shoot these birds, Will?" said Dick, lying back so as to
stare up at the gulls as they floated so easily by.

"Shoot them! Oh, no! The fishermen here never harm them; they're such
good friends."

"Why?" said Arthur.

"They show us where the fish are," replied Will. "We can see them with
the glass miles away, flapping about over a shoal of little ones, and
darting down and feeding on them; and where they are feeding, big fish
are sure to be feeding on the shoal as well."

"Then I shouldn't like to be a shoal of little fish," cried Dick. "Why,
as the clown said in the pantomime, `it would be dangerous to be safe.'
I wonder there are any small fish left."

"There are so many of them," said Will laughing; "thousands and millions
of them; so many sometimes in a shoal that they could not be counted,
and--"

"Stand by with the killick, m'lad," cried Josh, as he paddled slowly
now, with his eyes fixed first on one landmark, then on another.

"Ready," said Will, clearing the line, and raising a great stone, to
which the rope was fast, on to the edge of the boat.

"Drop her atop of the little rock as I say when," growled Josh.

"Right," answered back Will.

Josh backed the boat a few yards; and as Dick and his brother gazed over
the stem they were looking down into black water one moment and then
they glided over a pale-green rock flecked with brown waving weeds.

"When!" cried Josh.

_Plash_!

The big stone went over the side on to the rock, which seemed pretty
level, and then as the line ran over the stern Josh began to row once
more, and the boat glided over the sharp edge of the rock and into black
water once more that seemed of tremendous depth.

"Now, forrard, my lad," said Josh; and Will passed him and took his
place right in the bows.

Here a similar process was gone through.

After rowing slowly about thirty yards Josh stopped.

"That ought to do it," he said. "She won't come no further. Over with
it."

Will was standing up now in the bows swinging a grapnel to and fro, and
after letting it sway three or four times he launched it from him, and
it fell with a splash a score of yards away, taking with it another
line, upon whic