21 
events in the height of summer) ; I received them in their 
natural state on Tuesday evening, and put them into a bath 
formed by the solution of some antiseptic in powder, which 
the late Mr. Frank Buckland had procured for me. The 
bath totally destroyed the beauty of colours of the fish, 
and turned them into a dirty brown, but I ate one of those 
fish on the Saturday after in perfectly good condition and 
flavour, and I could have eaten the other in the same state, 
so far as the flesh went, on the Saturday after that again, 
but the flies had got at the gills, and the idea was distasteful. 
I wrote for some more of the disinfectant, and the reply that 
I got was that the company was in liquidation, and that I 
could have the patent for .£1,000; so I thought no more of 
the matter and have forgotten the name of the disinfectant. 
I only mention the matter to show of what service antiseptics 
may be. 
The drift fishery of which I have been speaking is the 
principal mackerel fishery now, and supplies us with 
practically the whole of this fish. The few thousand 
mackerel taken at present each year in seines are wholly 
absorbed in strictly local markets. The mackerel takes 
bait, but, generally speaking, shyly. Every five or six 
years they turn up in large shoals, which are intensely 
localised, in the autumn and for about two hours a day, in 
the evening, for a week or ten days, take surface bait 
greedily. I, myself, once cruising backwards and forwards 
over a little patch of ground (where a shoal of this sort had 
located itself), for about two hours between five and eight 
on each evening, for four days in August month, took, on a 
whiffing or light hand-line and on a hook baited with a 
strip cut from an old white kid glove, over three hundred 
fish. I have known the mackerel to be in shoals in 
December, but this is rare. When they do occur in 
