One voice sings the intervening line, and all join in the chorus. At this time the two sides of the net are in close proximity. As the bunt of the seine nears the shore, silence prevails, partly because it is a critical moment, and the orders with regard to handling the net must be promptly obeyed, and partly from the common hope that it may be a great haul of fish. This hope that the next haul may be the fortunate one is long sustained, and as often revived as each disappointment is met. The fisherman's imagination populates the waters with wandering shoals of fishes, which may at any moment crowd into the seine berth and reward the hopes which the fortune of the season has not before fulfilled. The half-moon area of the water inside the line of corks now begins to show an agitated appearance. At first occasional irregular waves and dull movements of patches of water, and later, little quick swirls and ruffled wavelets, cover the surface. Now and then a large fish makes a rapid curve shoreward, and out again. Soon the splashing begins, and increases as the mass of fish is pulled and crowded on the beach, until the spray obscures them, and whoever ventures too near is sprinkled with flying drops, and spangled with adhering scales. Often the huge form of a sturgeon slides heavily through the glistening mass, and endangers the net, as he is apt to tear an outlet through its meshes. Some one steps into the flurrying heap, and, blinded with the spray, strikes the cruel gaff-hook into its side. In its maddened struggles to get away it sometimes drags the man from his feet, floundering among the slimy fishes. It is at last dragged out, and curves its great body, and slaps its tail against the sand, staring sullenly out of its little pig-like eyes, which have not at all a fishy expression. Half exciting pity, you surmise that there may be more of dull brute mind in this clumsy inhabitant of the water than man is able to know in the present state of animal psychology. He is said to know enough to reconnoitre the upper edge of a pound net above water before he jumps lumberingly, though with considerable precision, over it. Everything is pulled out, high and dry, the flapping soon ends, the eyes assume a dull look, and a dead mass lies in the place of the active, brilliant shoal of fishes which came up in the net. The boats are soon again on their way. The shad and rock-fish are now picked out, and sent away to be boxed with broken ice for the daily shipment. The "herring" are thrown on the tables, to be dressed by the long line of bedraggled but merry black women, who, with wonderful skill and rapidity, keep up a continued shower of fish into the hand-barrows, dis criminating with a touch between " herring," "roe herring," and "herring." These are afterward washed, and sent to the salting-house. When a great haul comes in, the enthusiasm spreads, and all gather round to see the fish. At Avoca Beach, on the great Capehart Plantation, one hundred and sixty-five thousand "herring" were brought in at one haul of a seine twenty-four hundred yards long. It required four hours of severe labor for fifty men to get them ashore, after the bag of the net came to land. The pile, when on the dock, measured eighty feet front, twenty-two feet wide, and averaged about eighteen inches deep. Only a few hundred shad and rock-fish were found among them. The management of a great seine might well employ the talent of a skillful civil engineer, there are so many mechanical forces to put in operation, and so much skill and judgment to be used in structures and appliances. The seining ground has to be cleared up, requiring divers, giant GAFFING A STURGEON. their fisheries. This has been the custom in these regions from early times. The fishery once owned by General Washington, which frequently had his personal control, is still represented by one in the immediate vicinity, at Ferry Landing, on the Potomac. powder, and hoisting apparatus to raise | dom exercise direct daily supervision of rocks and the great cypress stumps and knees. Steam-tugs and small vessels for transporting the fish, and steam-engines and machinery, are part of the general outfit. Many of the devices and improvements are invented on the shores. The seine must be carefully "hung" between the cork and lead lines, so that the lower portion will draw a little in front of the upper, and so that the twine shall not strain unevenly. A seine badly hung may have the tendency to lift the lead line from the bottom in places, and allow the fish to escape; or it may give the lead line the tendency to roll up the lower portion of the seine, or tend to sink the line in front of the bag in the mud, and anchor it there. The wind, tide, and current influence the later positions of the seine, and must be considered before it is "shot" from the boats. A constant watch is required upon its workings, and it is quite usual to keep a horse saddled, to send orders down the beach to each end of the line. The investments in large fisheries sometimes reach the sum of $30,000. A fishery on Albemarle Sound, from the footing up of its books, during a period of nine years, exhibited an aggregate profit of $55,000. The proprietors of the plantations-often men of culture and education-not sel In the shad fisheries of the bays and some of the Southern rivers we have the drift-fishing, of similar character in its methods to that on the coasts of Scotland, which has been made interesting in the novels of Reade and Macdonald. The head of Chesapeake Bay is the centre of a large fleet of drift-net fishing-boats, or "gillers," which is the comprehensive local term. The "gilling ground" extends from Havre de Grace, Maryland, eastward and southward to the mouth of the Chester River. Between Havre de Grace and Spesutie Island a shoal extends with the navigable channel to the westward, and to the eastward an old partially filled up channel known as the Swash. Near the centre of the shoal a light-house has been built, called the Battery Light. When the shad have reached this point in the bay, they come up on the shoal in the night, at slack water of ebb and flood of tide. From the Battery Light to the head of the island is known to be the centre of their congregation, and a great strife for the good berths floats at the surface, and the lightly weight- | ed lead line at low tide trails along the bottom. At each end of the nets, which have ordinarily a length of three hundred yards, a float is tied, upon which rides a lantern. These lanterns are required to distinguish the different nets, as they are cast along the shoal parallel to each other, often with not more than fifty or sixty feet intervening. They drift with the tide, and one floating too slowly, or snagged at the bottom, becomes fouled with its neighbor as soon as it is overtaken. It is essential that all are put out simultaneously, or the dividing spaces soon become irregular, and many of them too narrow, resulting in the nets becoming entangled with each other. A still night on the bay, in the height of the season, is a pleasant experience. The anchored boats, scarcely discernible in the dusk, become deep shadowy masses at intervals or disappear in the darkness. Suddenly a muffled, quiet movement of oars is heard, and in quick succession lights appear on the water in a long line, and the rapid movement of a hundred pairs of oars is heard as they click in rest, and he rarely gets half a dozen strokes ahead. One hundred boats often pull abreast across the line of the shoal. The second lantern floating on the water announces the net all out. Standing in the night on an elevated point of the island, with many hundred lights strewn thickly over the wide expanse of water, the observer is impressed with the similarity of the view above him and below, as if the stars overhead were reflected on the surface of the bay with double brilliancy. The boatman either turns directly back and "runs the net"-passing the cork line through the hands-readily detecting the presence of the fish, or he rows back to the starting-point, and it is run from that end, the net all the time drifting with the tide. The shad, whenever found, are "ungilled" and thrown into the boat, and the net drops away again. The necessity for instantly going over the net relates to the presence of great quantities of eels, which soon spoil the shad for the market, or for the table. Sitting in my boat while the oarsman was quietly rowing behind a "giller," we were It often happens, when an attracted by a continual splashing in a net | the boat. near by. We thought it to be a sturgeon chored apart from the rest, that the two rolling and entangling himself in the boatmen "oversleep the tide," and find twine, as they sometimes do. Heading themselves, in the small hours of the the boat in the direction of the sound, and morning, chilly and solitary in the midcoming near, it seemed at first to be a num- dle of the bay. ber of "herring" meshed in a singularly close huddle, and in their struggles flashing their white sides in the dim starlight. As we came nearer, I turned the light of the lantern full upon them, and discovered a swarm of eels tearing and stripping the flesh from the bones of a shad which had gilled itself near the cork line. Gathered in a writhing mass, with their heads centred upon the fragment of the fish, we had before us the living model of a drowning medusa. There was at least a bushel of them, greedily crowding each other, fastening their teeth in the flesh of the shad, and by a quick, muscular torsion snatching pieces from the dying fish. It is not uncommon to see a dozen heads of shad, each with a long slender backbone attached, taken one after another out of the net, when a fisherman has delayed a little too long. Six good eels have been thrown into the boat by a dexterous jerk of the net, where a mutilated shad was hanging. I have seen four eels fall out of the abdominal cavity of a shad, when no eels were visible when the fish came over the gunnel. They had devoured the viscera, which seems always to be the first portion sought by them. The habit is to run the net as soon as it is all out, and take the fish out immediately, before they can be injured by the eels. The eels never mesh, they are too slippery to get entangled. In the shoal fishing, when the weather becomes warm, the "eel-cuts," as these are called, often outnumber the marketable shad. The fishermen salt down the better ones for their winter food. Quiet and harmony is the ordinary state of their communion, although the strife for good berths sometimes arouses a dissension. An attempt to anticipate the line of boats in laying out the nets at too early a stage of the tide calls forth sudden and certain penalty. Not only the boats on each side, but some of those from a distance, crowd around and unite their protests, and when these are unavailing the offender is hemmed in. by the boatmen, who in a half-jocose manner, yet with a fully in earnest purpose, set their nets across the line of direction he has started in-"surrounding him." If he is still obstinate enough to persist, or to attempt to cut the nets which are in his way, a mélée ensues, and some sturdy boatman is apt to belabor him into reason with an oar, public opinion favoring a certain amount of this kind of punishment. The boats used in the head of the bay are small, and the "mutton - leg" sails have no provision for reefing. The foresail is much the larger, and sail is shortened by unstepping the foremast and putting the mainsail in its place. At the approach of a squall they hurriedly pull in the nets, and scatter like a shoal of mullets when a porpoise appears among them. They get caught out occasionally, and getting to the lee of the shoal or the island, they sometimes lie with the killock out all day. As the season draws to a close the enthusiasm flags. The rivers to the north are now at the height of their season, which lessens the demand in their home market. The boats drop off nightly, the The net is "run" twice or three times more industrious fishermen, and the lazier and is then taken up. Little else than ones, who have idled while the season shad are taken; a few striped bass and a passed unheeded, continue the longest. few suckers are occasionally found. The The once populous bay, with a cool northcaptures, to each boat with two men, num-easter blowing, becomes a desolate extent ber from "water hauls" to several hundred shad. After the first tide's fishing the boats anchor. Often several tie fast to an anchored one, and the men while away the hours to the next tide in gossip and yarnspinning, or go to sleep in the bottom of of water, lonely and cold to the straying boatmen, and so it remains until well on in the autumn, when the migration of the vast flocks of wild fowl, streaming in continuously from the north, gathers the duck-hunters to the vacated haunts of the fishermen. |