skill, alertness and knowledge
which go to catching the greatest possible number of fish while
they are up. It is often said that the mackerel allows itself to
be caught as easily by a beginner as by an old hand. One or two
mackerel may: mackerel don't. In hooking, as opposed to fishing
fine with a rod, the sporting element is supplied by fish, not
_a_ fish; by numbers in a given time, not bend and break. The
tackle brought to the sea by the superior angler, who thinks he
knows more than those who have hooked mackerel for generations,
is a wonder, delight, and irritation to professional fishermen:
it is constructed in such robust ignorance of the habits, and
manner of biting, of mackerel, and it ignores so obstinately the
conditions of the sport. Likewise the fish ignore _it_.

[Sidenote: _DAWN AT SEA_]

Tony scrambled aboard over the starboard bow, his trousers and boots
dripping. "'Tis al'ays like that, putting off from thees yer damn'd ol'
baych. No won'er us gits the rhuematics." He hung the rudder, loosed
the mizzen. I stepped the mast, hoisted the jib and lug, and made fast
halyards and sheets. Our undignified bobbing, our impatient wallowing
on the water stopped short. The wind's life entered into the craft. She
bowed graciously to the waves. With a motion compounded of air and
water, wings and a heaving, as if she were airily suspended over the
sea, the _Cock Robin_ settled to her course. Spray skatted gleefully
over her bows and the wavelets made a gurgling music along the
clinker-built strakes of her.

Tony put out the lines: tangled two of them, got in a tear, as he calls
it, snapped the sid, bit the rusty hook off, spat out a shred of old
bait, brought the boat's head too far into the wind, cursed the
flapping sail and cursed the tiller, grubbed in his pockets for a new
hook, and made tiny knots with clumsy great fingers and his teeth.
"An't never got no gear like I used tu," he complained, and then,
standing upright, with the tiller between his legs and a line in each
outstretched hand, he unbuttoned his face and broke into the merriest
of smiles. "What du 'ee think o' Tony then, getting in a tear fust
start out? Do 'ee think he's maazed--or obsolete? But we'll catch 'em
if they'm yer. Yu ought to go 'long wi' Uncle Jake. He'd tell 'ee
summut--and the fish tu if they wasn't biting proper!"

By the time the lines were out, the dun s