and men's brains are too restless. At a ball-game the
sight of a man slumbering on the benches is inconceivable.

Sea-fishing also attracted me very much. On the California coast, around
Catalina and other islands, great sport is to be had among the
yellow-tails, running up to 50 lbs. weight. They are a truly game fish
and put up a capital fight. Jew-fish up to 400 lbs. are frequently
caught with rod and line, but are distinctly not a game fish. Albacores
can be taken in boat-loads; they are game enough but really too common.
The tuna is _par excellence_ the game fish of the coast. At one time you
might reasonably expect to get a fish (nothing under 100 lbs. counted),
but lately, and while I was there, a capture was so rare as to make the
game not worth the candle. A steam or motor launch is needed and that
costs money. I hired such a boat once or twice; but the experience of
some friends who had fished every day for two months and not got one
single blessed tuna damped my ambition. Tunas there run up to 300 lbs.,
big enough, and yet tiny compared with the monsters of the
Mediterranean, the Morocco coast and the Japanese seas; there they run
up to 2000 lbs. The tuna is called the "leaping" tuna because he plays
and hunts his prey on the surface of the water; but he never "leaps" as
does the tarpon. Once hooked he goes off to sea and will tow your boat
maybe fifteen miles; that is to say, he partly tows the boat, but the
heavy motor launch must also use its power to keep up or the line will
at once be snapped. The tuna belongs to the mackerel family, is built
like a white-head torpedo, and for gameness, speed and endurance is hard
to beat. Only the pala of the South Pacific Seas, also a mackerel, may,
according to Louis Becke, be his rival. Becke indeed claims it to be the
gamest of all fish. But its manoeuvres are different from a tuna's and
similar to those of the tarpon. What is finer sport, I think, and
perhaps not quite so killing to the angler, is tarpon-fishing. Most of
our ambitious tarpon fishers go to Florida, where each fish captured
will probably cost you some fifty dollars. My tarpon ground was at
Aransas Pass, on the Gulf Coast of Texas. There in September the fish
seem to congregate preparatory to their migration south. I have seen
them there in bunches of fifty to seventy, swimming about in shallow,
clear water, their great dorsal fins sticking out, for all the world
like a lot of sharks. My first experie