HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN MENHADEN. 611 



*<How many does that dipper bold?;' 



''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 sun- 

 set, 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 indefina- 

 ble 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." 



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 grandly to our ears wherever we 

 went. Yet the difficulties were none too great for these hardy fisher- 

 men, who balanced themselves in their cockle-shells, and rose and sank 

 with the huge billows, without losing their hold upon the seines or per- 

 mitting a single wretched bunker to escape. 



