66 FISHES I HAVE KNOWN 



the sublime Burial Service was read while the ship 

 was hove to and all hands were present, shrouded 

 in heavily- weighted canvas, and covered with the 

 red ensign — was slid from the grating into the 

 Atlantic, that " vast and wandering grave," to 

 await the day when the sea gives up the dead 

 which are in it. It brought to my mind Chantry's 

 beautiful monument in Gloucester Cathedral of a 

 woman ecstatically rising from the waves (she had 

 been buried at sea) with her child clasped to her 

 bosom — a statue as lifelike and haunting as 

 Roubillac's better-known Nightingale monument 

 in St. John's Chapel, Westminster Abbey. 



Leaving this painful subject, let me describe 

 shark-fishing at sea, and how we caught ours. 



First of all, we must have a special kind of 

 hook, for, remember, we are angling not for a 

 conger that might turn the scale at loolbs., or a 

 halibut of 500 lbs., but for a fish whose weight is 

 reckoned by the hundredweight, and for which the 

 biggest Redditch conger hook would be as of little 

 use as a hat-pin. The proper thing is bigger 

 than the largest butcher's hook, measuring five 

 inches across the bend, and should be made of the 

 finest tempered steel, with a verj- sharp point, and 

 connected by a .swivel with a few feet of well- 



