CHAPTER VII 



THE TOPE AND OTHER LEAPING SHARKS 



' Flat fish, with eyes distorted, square, ovoid, rhomboid long. 

 Some cased in mail, some slippery-backed, the feeble and the strong ; 

 Sedaned on poles, or dragged on hooks, or poured from tubs like water, 

 Gasp side by side, together piled, in one promiscuous slaughter.' 



Badham. 



ESnEOKlMENT is an important factor in discussing, or 

 even thinking of the game fishes. There are anglers 

 who look Avith horror npon the shark, and smile in derision when 

 this musky, big man-kUler is mentioned in the same class with 

 trout, salmon, tuna or tarpon. 



It is a matter of location and condition, and I recognize the 

 fact that of all men the writer on game fishes should hesitate 

 to denoimee certain fishes as not game, merely because he has 

 never had any experience with them. Thus I have lived in 

 various countries where eels, and large ones, were common as 

 the morays of Florida, the snake-Uke moray of Santa CataUna, 

 a veritable sea serpent ; and there are others. One is distinctly 

 impressed on my memory. My father was at the time an army 

 oflBcer, surgeon of the garrison at Fort Monroe. It was just 

 after the Civil War, and my mother's boudoir was a casemate, 

 caUing to mind Beauchamp Tower in the Tower of London. The 

 casemate had as a window a port for the ten-inch Columbiad, 

 which had not been mounted as the place was used for officers' 

 quarters, and looked into the wide moat. I sometimes fished 

 from this point of vantage, and one day hooked a mighty eel, a 

 dark-green fellow with yellow spots, and a mouth with the 

 teeth of a shark and the capacity of a boa constrictor, I brought 

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