s made reply.

"Mad!--why mad?" repeated R----.

"The pilot says, my Lord, that she is so, and looking for her husband,"
the cockswain answered.

"Where's her husband? Is he drowned, eh?" continued R----.

"No, my Lord," the sailor said, twitching up his trowsers, and walking
aft towards the quarter-deck; "her husband was a fisherman, and lived
hard by, my Lord,--up there. About fifteen years ago the man was bathing
hereabouts, and he was eaten up by mackerel; but the old woman thinks,
my Lord, he has only dived, and soon will rise again."

And so indeed the legend goes. One morning, fifteen summers past, the
poor fisherman plunged into the element, that had been his sole
sustaining friend from youth, to bathe, and before scarce fifteen
minutes had elapsed, surrounded by a shoal of mackerel, and in sight of
home and her who made it home, was devoured by these ravenous fish. When
he raised his arms from out the water to show the dreadful fate that
threatened him, and to rouse the alarm of his unconscious wife, a
hundred mackerel hung, like plummets, from the flesh. The fisherman
sank, and was never seen or heard of more. From that morning until
to-day his widow, having lost her reason, ever rows her husband's pram
about the spot where he perished, in the full persuasion, which she
certifies in her song, that he has gone to seek a sunken net, and in a
little while will emerge again; and, so, she prays the crew of every
vessel sailing by to stay and see the truth of what she speaks.

We arrived at Sand the same afternoon, and after ransacking the little
place from house to house, found the proprietor of the salmon river
there. With the good nature and extreme courtesy of his countrymen, the
Norwegian gave assent that we might angle, and not only favoured my two
indefatigable friends with a prolonged dissertation on the peculiarities
of the Sand salmon, but offered to undertake any duty that might lessen
the difficulties and increase the chances of taking a few of these
extraordinary fish.

It seems that the time when a salmon has been caught with a fly in the
Sand river is completely beyond the memory of the oldest inhabitant of
the village; nor is the task less difficult to snare this crafty species
in a net. On our arrival on the banks, or more properly rocks, of the
river, the salmon were thrusting their heads, like the bubbles of a
boiling pot, above the water; and leaping from one ledge of rock to a
higher, th