m, roaring out
orders, and eagerly watchful of the lights of his encroaching neighbors.
With the schooner heeled over to leeward, and rushing along through the
blackness, the boats are launched, and the men tumble over the side into
them, until perhaps the cook, the boy, and the skipper are alone on deck.
One big boat, propelled by ten stout oarsmen, carries the seine, and with
one dory is towed astern the schooner until the school is overhauled, then
casts off and leaps through the water under the vigorous tugs of its
oarsmen. In the stern a man stands throwing over the seine by armsful. It
is the plan of campaign for the long boat and the dory, each carrying one
end of the net, to make a circuit of the school, and envelope as much of
it as possible in the folds of the seine. Perhaps at one time boats from
twenty or thirty schooners will be undertaking the same task, their
torches blazing, their helmsmen shouting, the oars tossing phosphorescent
spray into the air. In and out among the boats the schooners pick their
way--a delicate task, for each skipper wishes to keep as near as possible
to his men, yet must run over neither boats or nets belonging to his
rival. Wonderfully expert helmsmen they become after years of this sort
of work--more trying to the nerves and exacting quite as much skill as the
"jockeying" for place at the start of an international yacht race.

When the slow task of drawing together the ends of the seine until the
fish are fairly enclosed in a sort of marine canal, a signal brings the
schooner down to the side of the boats. The mackerel are fairly trapped,
but the glare of the torches blinds them to their situation, and they
would scarcely escape if they could. One side of the net is taken up on
the schooner's deck, and there clamped firmly, the fish thus lying in the
bunt, or pocket between the schooners, and the two boats which lie off
eight or ten feet, rising and falling with the sea. There, huddled
together in the shallow water, growing ever shallower as the net is
raised, the shining fish, hundreds and thousands of them, bushels,
barrels, hogsheads of them, flash and flap, as the men prepare to swing
them aboard in the dip net. This great pocket of cord, fit to hold perhaps
a bushel or more, is swung from the boom above, and lowered into the midst
of the catch. Two men in the boat seize its iron rim, and with a twist and
shove scoop it full of mackerel. "Yo-heave-oh" sing out the men at the