21 



events in the height of summer) ; I received them in their 

 natural state on Tuesday evening, and put them into a bath 

 formed by the solution of some antiseptic in powder, which 

 the late Mr. Frank Buckland had procured for me. The 

 bath totally destroyed the beauty of colours of the fish, 

 and turned them into a dirty brown, but I ate one of those 

 fish on the Saturday after in perfectly good condition and 

 flavour, and I could have eaten the other in the same state, 

 so far as the flesh went, on the Saturday after that again, 

 but the flies had got at the gills, and the idea was distasteful. 

 I wrote for some more of the disinfectant, and the reply that 

 I got was that the company was in liquidation, and that I 

 could have the patent for .1,000 ; so I thought no more of 

 the matter and have forgotten the name of the disinfectant. 

 I only mention the matter to show of what service antiseptics 

 may be. 



The drift fishery of which I have been speaking is the 

 principal mackerel fishery now, and supplies us with 

 practically the whole of this fish. The few thousand 

 mackerel taken at present each year in seines are wholly 

 absofbed in strictly local markets. The mackerel takes 

 bait, but, generally speaking, shyly. Every five or six 

 years they turn up in large shoals, which are intensely 

 localised, in the autumn and for about two hours a day, in 

 the evening, for a week or ten days, take surface bait 

 greedily. I, myself, once cruising backwards and forwards 

 over a little patch of ground (where a shoal of this sort had 

 located itself), for about two hours between five and eight 

 on each evening, for four days in August month, took, on a 

 whiffing or light hand-line and on a hook baited with a 

 strip cut from an old white kid glove, over three hundred 

 fish. I have known the mackerel to be in shoals in 

 December, but this is rare. When they do occur in 



