The two who had broken the record for winter travel on the Yukon, side by side in the sunshine, on a plank laid across two mackerel firkins, sit and watch the brimming flood.

That's the reason that I like mackerel-fishing, though I have no fondness for mackerels themselves, for they are cannibals.

Southwards, you may be sure, they bent their flight, And harbour'd in a hollow rock at night: Next morn they rose, and set up every sail; The wind was fair, but blew a mackerel gale: The sickly young sat shivering on the shore, Abhorr'd salt water never seen before, And pray'd their tender mothers to delay The passage, and expect a fairer day.

About an hour brought me inside what is called by the dwellers thereabout the "outer island,"its gray-red rocks tufted here and there with patches of coarse grass, and weather-worn and seamed by surf and storm, with the usual accompaniment of mackerel-gulls screaming and soaring aloft at the approach of a stranger.

When he finally did arrive, the other lad had brought to light a pair of heavily leaded, large-hooked lines and a mackerel-keg of salt sardines.

When she had gone, the storekeeper returned to his seat on the mackerel kit, and was accosted by a pensive neighbor in high boots who sat upon the upturned end of a case of brogans.

When red mullet are abundant in fishmongers' shops, a fine mackerel season may be expected.

And some thirty years later, during a yachting excursion off the Scilly Isles, I saw an even more remarkable duel between a porbeagleas the Cornish people call the mackerel-sharkand a pipit, in which, strange to relate, the bird came off victorious.

He meets a friend at White's, and they adjourn presently to the Fleece Tavern, where the drawer brings them a bottle of New French and a neat's tongue, over which they discuss the doctrine of predestination so hotly that two mackerel-vendors burst in, mistaking their lifted voices for a cry for fish.