134 WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 



of the tropics and all the vivid colours of the day still distinct, 

 but softened down to a mothlike texture, and the blue tiles on 

 the house above the arches glittering in the moon's rays. 



If you add to these sensations of colour, and the perfect 

 stillness, the scent of pinewood planks and the perfume of 

 pineapples you have an air to linger over, a delicious 

 intoxication. 



Both the people of Ponta Delgada and the town itself 

 are very clean. Living in the Portuguese Hotel costs five 

 shillings per day, with extremely good feeding beef from oxen 

 on the hills fed on wild geraniums, heath, and hydrangeas, 

 and fish of many kinds. 



I tried my trammel net for fish alongside in the bay. I 

 set it with the second mate's help ; it is forty fathoms 



in length, and by mid- 

 day there was quite a 

 good catch of many- 

 coloured bream, and 

 those exquisite silvery 

 fish, about the size and 

 shape of a saucer, that 

 are such excellent eat- 

 ing. The trammel net 

 is quite new here, and 

 is new to my Norwegian 

 companions and to the 

 natives. I find it of much 

 use on our Berwickshire 



coast for supplying the house with fish. It consists of a wall, 

 as it were, of fine net hung between two nets of very large 

 mesh ; with corks on top and leads below. It can be set either 

 standing on the bottom or hanging from the surface the 

 fish swim against it, make a bag of the fine net through a 

 mesh of either of the big nets, and in this pocket they stay 

 till you overhaul your net, possibly once a day. 



Here we found a worm like one leg of a star-fish made such 

 havoc with our captive fish in the net that we had to over- 

 haul it every four hours or so. On the second evening I 

 got three splendid fish, like salmon, of about six pounds each, 



