298 BLUE-FISHING. 



" A yery sweet fish indeed," he said, " all of them 

 which is not bones or sand, and that is not much. 

 And by the way, I may say incidentally, that while 

 there is a little real white-bait, the young of the her- 

 ring, sold in New York markets, what is usually 

 passed off under that name, is a mixture of all sorts 

 of young or small fish, among which the spearing 

 holds a prominent place, and that it is about as 

 miserable a substitute for real white-bait as mussels 

 are for oysters." 



Of course this fact was well known to our party, 

 but the beauty of spearing was misleading some of 

 them, as beauty has misled some of us more or less 

 during our lives. The Superintendent was too im- 

 patient, having finished his own breakfast, to listen 

 to the abstract discourses of his superior, and direct- 

 ed the men to get under- way at once and put out 

 from the quiet bay into the turbulent ocean. Soon 

 they had passed the inner buoy off Havemeyer's 

 Point and were pitching into the rollers that tum- 

 bled in over the bar which was showing its outlines 

 by the angry heads of the seas breaking in front of 

 them. On they went, the yacht gracefully bowing 

 as she plunged into the waves. 



There is something exhilarating about the motion 

 of a small vessel at sea. A ship is so large that she 

 has a steady movement and does no more than roll 

 from side to side, but a small yacht dances and 

 pitches and jumps and tosses with the uneasiness of 

 a living thing. To look at one going by, she is the 

 perfection of grace, she rises and falls, lifts and 



