aw as they swim, and are fitted with a straining
apparatus of bristles, like those on the mandibles of a musk duck. They
feed only on minute organisms, and will not look at a bait, except it
be the tiny worm which lives in the long celluroid tubes of the coral
growing upon _congewei_. And then you must have a line as fine as
horsehair, and a hook small enough--but strong enough to hold a
three-pound fish--to tempt them.

As the tide rose higher, and the incoming water bubbled and hissed as it
poured through the narrow entrance underneath the tree-bole on which
we sat, red bream, silvery bream, and countless myriads of the small,
staring-eyed and delicate fish, locally known as "hardy-heads," would
rush in, to return to the deeper waters of the bay as the tide began to
fall.

Sometimes--and perhaps "Red Spinner" of the _Field_ may have seen the
same thing in his piscatorial wanderings in the Antipodes--huge gar-fish
of three or four feet in length, with needle-toothed, narrow jaws, and
with bright, silvery, sinuous bodies, as thick as a man's arm, would
swim languidly in, seeking for the young mullet and gar-fish which had
preceded them into the shallow waters beyond. These could be caught
by the hand by suddenly gripping them just abaft of the head. A Moruya
River black boy, named "Cass" (_i.e._, Casanova), who had been brought
up with white people almost from infancy, was a past-master in this sort
of work. Lying lengthwise upon the tree which bridged the opening, he
would watch the giant gars passing in, swimming on the surface. Then his
right arm would dart down, and in an instant a quivering, twisting, and
gleaming "Long Tom" (as we called them) would be held aloft for a moment
and then thrown into a flour-sack held open in readiness to receive it.

Surely this was "sport" in the full sense of the word; for although
"Long Tom" is as greedy as a pike, and can be very easily caught by a
floating bait when he is hungry, it is not every one who can whip him
out of the water in this manner.

There were at least four varieties of mullet which frequented the bay,
and in the summer we frequently caught numbers of all four in the lagoon
by running a net across the narrow opening, and when the tide ran out
we could discern their shining bodies hiding under the black-leaved
sea-grass which grew in some depressions and was covered, even at low
tide, by a few inches of water. Two of the four I have described; and
now single