SEA-BASS AND OTHER FISHES. 34 1 



among the bushes and coots and shelldrakes sported in the 

 water. In these solitudes the birds remained safe from the 

 murderous cockney gunner from the North, who is always 

 wanting to kill something, and has driven away from the great 

 frequented routes of travel much of the bird-life formerly 

 so abundant. 



SURF-FISHING FOR RED BASS. 



"Off where the slender light-house lifts 

 Like sheeted ghost, above the surge, 

 Casting its warning flames at night 

 Far to the dim horizon's verge; 

 There anchored, when the tides are low, 



And first the young flood bubbling flows, 

 The fisher far the spinning line 



Deep down with trustful ardor throws." 



McLellan, " Poems of Rod and Gun." 



February twenty-fifth, the weather being warm, and the tide 

 serving this morning, we went down the river for a few hours 

 fishing in the surf. Leaving our boat where the high bank 

 joined the beach, we crossed a wide expanse of sand, bounded 

 on the north by dunes fifteen or twenty feet high, on the 

 south by the Inlet, and on the east by the ocean beach, level, 

 solid, and about ioo yards wide at low water. Above this 

 gently-sloping beach the sandy flat was nearly a quarter of a 

 mile wide, scattered with sea shells of various kinds, cast 

 up by the waves clams, mussels, conchs, scallops, with egg. 

 cases of Sharks, and other sea-fruit; a fleet of the Portu- 

 guese man of war, Physalia, stranded on the beach and 

 drying in the sun. Here and there, the burrow of a sand 

 crab, its owner peeping out; vestiges of wrecks, in the shape 

 of water-worn spars and broken planks; sea-beans which 

 have floated from West India shores, and occasionally the 

 delicate shell of the paper nautilus, or Argonaut usually 

 more or less damaged. One of these shells was once found 

 here containing its living inhabitant, which is very rare, as 



