almon are sent to market, but as the flesh
is somewhat coarse, they are only bought by the poorer members of the
community, 4d. and 6d. each being considered a good retail price for a
10 lb. fish. The roes, however, are excellent eating, and some attempt
has been made to smoke them on a large scale, but like everything else
connected with the fishing industry (or rather want of industry) in New
South Wales, has failed. It sometimes happens (as I once witnessed in
Trial Bay, on the coast of New South Wales) that heavy weather will
set in when the salmon are either passing inwards over the bars or are
returning to sea. The destruction that is then wrought among them is
terrific. On the occasion of which I speak, every heavy roller that
reared and then dashed upon the beach flung upon the sands hundreds of
the fish, stunned and bleeding. At one spot where the beach had but a
very slight inclination towards the water from the line of scrub above
high-water mark there were literally many thousands of salmon, lying
three and four deep, and in places piled up in irregular ridges and
firmly packed together with sand and seaweed.

"JACK SHARK"

"What is the greatest number of sharks that you have ever seen together
at one time?" asked an English lady in San Francisco of Captain Allen,
of the New Bedford barque _Acorn Barnes_.

"Two or three hundred when we have been cutting-in a whale; two or three
thousand in Christmas Island lagoon."

Some of the hardy old seaman's listeners smiled somewhat incredulously
at the "two or three thousand," but nevertheless he was not only not
exaggerating, but might have said five or six thousand. The Christmas
Island to which he referred must not be mistaken for the island of the
same name in the Indian Ocean--the Cocos-Keeling group. It is in the
North Pacific, two degrees north of the equator and 157.30 W., and is
a low, sandy atoll, encompassing a spacious but rather shallow lagoon,
teeming with non-poisonous fish. It is leased from the Colonial Office
by a London firm, who are planting the barren soil with coconut trees
and fishing the lagoon for pearl-shell. Like many other of the isolated
atolls in the North Pacific, such as the Fannings, Palmyra, and
Providence Groups, the lagoon is resorted to by sharks in incredible
numbers; and even at the present time the native labourers employed by
the firm alluded to make a considerable sum of money by catching sharks
and drying the fins a