came into view, the steamer's head was turned southeastward, toward Montauk, which, in the growing light, now stood out plain in every bleak feature of sandy dune and treeless moor. Now a very sharp lookout must be kept for fish, and after the substantial breakfast in the forecastle, I took my pipe and a place in the shrouds. Even then I could not look across Montauk, but could easily see two great ponds of fresh water, which nearly served to make an island of the Point. One of them, Fort Poud, was once a scene of sanguinary warfare between the Montauks and Narragansetts, the latter being beaten only by help from the Shelter Island Indians, who drove the invaders to their

canoes.

Off Culloden Point the lookout excitedly announced, "Fish off the port bow!" The captain seized his glass, and scanned the water. So did I. "There's a big bunch," he shouts. "Watch 'em flirt their tails! Good color! See how red the water is!"

"O, yes; to be sure," I cry. "By Jove, that's a good color!" My vacant face must have belied my words, but he didn't notice it. He was shouting, "Lower away the boats! Stand by to ship the nets!" furiously ringing signals to the engineer; giving hasty orders to the wheelsman; enscorcing himself in a pair of oil skin trousers, so capa cious I half expected he would disappear altogether; and so, amid the roar of escaping steam, the creaking of davit tackle, the laughing excitement of the crews, and the rattle of rowlocks, I tumble head foremost into a boat, and the steamer was left behind. Now the flirting of tiny tails was plainly visible, but I must confess that I did not learn to distinguish the reddish hue which indicates a school of these fish until much later in the day. The two large boats side by side were sculled rapidly toward the shore where the fish were seen, the forward part of each boat piled full of the brown seine, which extended in a great festoou from one to the other. There were four men in each boat, all standing up, and in our red shirts and shiny yellow oil skin overalls we must have made a pretty picture on that sunny morning. Close by was a pound-net, where a porpoise was rolling gaily, notwithstanding his captivity; but by maneuvering we got the "bunch" turned away from it and well inshore, where the water was not too deep. At last we were close to them, and now came a scene of excitement.

"Heave it!" yelled the captain, and in each boat a sailor whose place it was, worked like a steam engine throwing the net overboard, while the crews pulled with all their muscles in opposite directions around a circle perhaps a hundred yards in diameter, and defined by the line of cork buoys left behind, which should inclose the fish. In three minutes the boats were together again; the net was all paid out; an enormous weight of lead had been thrown overboard, drawing after it a line rove through the rings along the bottom of the seine. The effect, of course, was instantly to pucker the bottom of the net into a purse, and thus,

before the poor bunkers had fairly apprehended their danger, they were caught in a bag whose invisible folds held a cubic acre or two of water. This was sport! I had not bargained for the hard work to come, to the unsportive character of which my blistered palms soon testified. None of the fish were to be seen. Every fin of them had sunk to the bottom. Whether we had caught ten or ten thousand remained to be proved. Now, lifting the net is no easy job. The weight of nearly ten thousand square yards of seine is alone immense, but when it is wet with cold sea-water, and held back by the pushing of thousands of energetic little noses, to pull it into a rocking boat implies hard work. However, little by little it came over the gunwales, the first thing being to bring up the great sinker and ascertain that the closing of the purse at the bottom had been properly executed. Yard by yard the cork line was contracted, and one after another the frightened captives began to appear, some folded into a wrinkle or caught by the gills in a torn mesh (and such were thrown back), until at last the bag was reduced to only a few feet in diameter, and the menhaden were seen, a sheeny, gray, struggling mass, which bellied out the net under the cork lines and under the boats, in vain anxiety to pass the curious barrier which on every side hemmed them in, and in leaping efforts to escape the crowding of their thronging fellows. How they gleamed, like fish of jewels and gold! The sunshine, finding its way down through the clear green water, seemed not to reflect from their iridescent scales, but to penetrate them all, and illumine their bodies from within with a wonderful changing flame. Gleaming, shifting, lambent waves of color flashed and paled before my entranced eyes; gray as the fishes turned their backs, sweeping brightly back with a thousand brilliant tints as they showed their sides; soft, undefined, and mutable, down there under the green glass of the sea; while, to show them the better, myriads of minute medusæ hurried hither and thither, glittering like phosphorescent lanterns in gossamer frames and transparent globes.

All possible slack having now been taken in, the steamer approaches, and towing us away to deeper water, for we are drifting toward a lee shore, comes to a stand-still, and the work of loading begins. The cork line is lifted up and made fast to the steamer's bulwarks, to which the boats have already attached themselves at one end, holding together at the other. This crowds all the bunkers together in a mass between the two boats and the steamer's side, where the water boils with the churning of thousands of active fins. A twenty-foot oar is plunged into the mass, but will not suffice to sound its living depths. Then a great dipper of strong netting on an iron hoop is let down by tackle from the yard-arm, dipped into the mass under the guidance of a man on deck who holds the handle, the pony-engine puffs and shakes, and away aloft for an instant swings a mass of bunkers, only to be upset and fall like so much sparkling water into the resounding hold.

"How many does that dipper hold?”

"About a thousand."

“Very well, I will count how many times it goes after a load."

But I didn't. I forgot it in looking down the hatchway. The floor of the shallow hold was paved with animated silver, and every new addition falling in a lovely cataract from far overhead, seemed to shatter a million rainbows as it struck the yielding mass below, and slid away on every side to glitter in a new iridescence till another myriad of diamonds rained down. If you take it in your hand, the mossbunker is an ordinary-looking fish, like a small shad, and you do not admire it; but every gleaming fiery tint that ever burned in a sunset, or tinged a crystal, or painted the petals of a flower, was cast in lovely confusion into that rough hold. There lay the raw material of beauty, the gorgeous elements out of which dyes are resolved-abstract bits of lustrous azure and purple, crimson and gold, and those indefinable greenish and pearly tints that make the luminous background of all celestial sun-painting. As the steamer rolled on the billows, and the sun struck the wet and tremulous mass at this and that angle, or the whole was in the half-shadow of the deck, now a cerulean tint, now a hot brazen glow, would spread over all for an instant, until the wrig gling mixture of olive backs and pearly bellies and nacreous sides, with scarlet blood-spots where the cruel twine had wounded, was buried beneath a new stratum.

"How many?" I asked when all were in.

"Hundred and ten thousand," replied Captain Hawkins. "Pretty fair, but I took three times as many at one haul last week."

"What are they worth?"

"Oh, something over a hundred dollars.-Hard a-starboard! go ahead slow."

1

And the labor of the engines drowned the spat, spat, spat of the myriads of restless little tails struggling to swim out of their strange prison, while I climbed to the mast-head to talk with the grizzly old lookout, who had been round Cape Horn thirteen times, yet did not think himself much of a traveler.

The cry of, "Color off the port bow!" brought us quickly down the ratlines and again into the boats.

That day we caught 250,000 fish, and made a round trip of a hundred miles, going away outside of Montauk Point, where it was frightfully rough after a two days' easterly gale. Great mountains of water, green as liquid malachite, rolled in hot haste to magnificent destruction on the beach, where the snowy clouds of spray were floating dense and high, and the roar of the surf came graudly to our ears wherever we went. Yet the difficulties were none too great for these hardy fishermen, who balanced themselves in their cockle-shells, and rose and sank with the huge billows, without losing their hold upon the seines or permitting a single wretched bunker to escape.

5. The manufacture of sardines from menhaden.

(Paragraph 189, p. 137.)

The New York Times, April 12, 1874, has the following account of the Port Monmouth factory:

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"The scene at the fishing grounds off Sandy Hook at the height of the season is picturesque in the extreme. The day is usually a bright one, with just enough breeze to render the heat bearable and toss up the small white caps of the waves for the sunlight to sparkle on. The fishermen in their jaunty little ten-ton sloops have been lying off the 'grounds' since midnight. In the dim light of the early dawn the 'school' is descried approaching against the wind. The menhaden swims on the surface, and the serried ripples of myriads of fins cover the broad expanse for thousands of feet in every direction. The small boats are lowered, the long net, over 7,000 feet in length, and reaching 12 or 13 into the water, is carried out on both sides until the hapless fish are inclosed in a vast semicircle, through the meshy walls of which there is no escape, and from which they are ladled in thousands by the fishermen armed with small nets or scoops,' holding a peck apiece. The silly victims never think of escaping by swimming beneath the lower edge of the net, a few feet below the surface. The victims are then loaded on the sloops, which make sail as rapidly as possible for the factory dock at Port Monmouth. During rough or unusually breezy weather the general effect is greatly heightened. The flapping sails, careening boats, and spray-drenched fishermen, hauling on the seine with redoubled exertions in order to get in their catch before the wind freshens into a gale, forms a picture exhilarating even to old hands at the business. At the landing the fleet are greeted by the 180 employés in the factory, and the entire catch, often reaching a thousand bushels, is rapidly transferred to the shore. Then begins the more prosaic part of the process. The fish to be cured are selected from the catch, the medium-sized ones being preferred, their heads tails, and entrails removed by a new machine, the exclusive property of the company, and their bodies transferred to the 'scalers.' Only from a half to a fifth of the original haul is used, two hundred bushels being the ordinary amount handled daily. These the scalers' seize and submit to the scrapingmachine, a series of revolving curry-combs arranged on four lines of shafting 50 feet long, which frees each fish of its scales in the space of about a second and a half. As seventy or eighty men are at work, straining every nerve to get the 'catch' into the salt before the heat of the day, the rapidity with which the finny game are put through the various details is something startling. The 'cleaners' are long oval troughs of running water, over which revolves a series of brushes, something after the pattern of the 'scaler,' and which does all that its name implies in an almost equally short space of time. From this the fish go into the salting barrels, a stage of the work at which the men

เ

take breath for the first time. In these the fish are allowed to remain for two or three hours, at the end of which they are thoroughly cured, and are transferred to the zinc-covered tables, 8 feet by 6, with raised edges. In this position water is poured on them, and afterwards drained off in tubes connecting with the corners. The cooking cans, tin boxes a little larger than the ordinary packing cans, next receive them, and are then placed in steam tanks, seven in number, of a capacity of a ton each. Here they are left for two hours, during which they are thoroughly cooked. After being taken out and packed in the regular market-cans, the fish are conveyed to other tables, on which the process of oiling is gone through. Olive-oil is poured on them until the cans can hold no more, and the latter then passed to the tinners, of whom the company employ thirty-five, to go through the process of soldering. From this department they are taken back into another set of steam-tanks to be heated for venting. When the tin is at a proper temperature the can is taken out and a small hole opened at one end, through which the hot air is suffered to escape, and the aperture is then hermetically sealed. In the room adjoining the cans are packed in wooden cases for shipping, two dozen to the case. The retail price per full-sized can, containing from seven to nine fish, is fifty cents; that of the same size of the French imported goods, $1.10 in gold. The buildings of the company include a large factory, 360 feet long by 120 broad, and from four to five stories in height, and a boarding-house for their employés. The former contains the necessary rooms for the various departments of the work already described, together with the machinery and equipments, most of which are original with the present enterprise. The engine used is of fifty horse-power, amply sufficient for all ordinary purposes. The company board and lodge all their hands, make all the tin-work, cans, &c., and keep their own teams and carts for hauling their goods to the dock at Port Monmouth. The pay-roll of the establishment, excluding the board and lodging of all the workmen, is about $3,000 a month, reaching during the busiest part of the season as high as $1,000 per week. The boarding-house contains accommodations for 180 men, including dining rooms, sleeping rooms, &c. Everything is kept clean and in order, and the health and comfort of the inmates sedulously cared for. A long dock has been constructed near the entrance to the main building, in 15 feet of water, where the sloops and boats unload their cargoes. Several hundred thousand dollars have been invested in the business, the facilities of which are being enlarged annually. Besides the home business, done with every State in the Union, the company ship large consignments to foreign ports, including Liverpool, Hamburg, and other places. At the Vienna Exposition of last year their contributions attracted much attention, and were unanimously awarded the gold medal. of honor and the grand diploma of merit. An agency was also established in that city for Austria and Russia, which has since acquired a fine business. At home they have received flattering indorsements and