cool, patient, calculating, experienced—forms
a judgment concerning the best mode of
proceeding; he decides where it is best for the two
larger boats to anchor, and how the cock-boat
may best go out to reconnoitre the enemy. The
men in the boats obey the signals of the huer,
as the captains in the Baltic fleet would those
given forth by Sir Charles Napier from the
Duke of Wellington; they know it is to their
interest, having a good general, to attend to
his behests.

It is an anxious moment when this state of
things has arrived, for the pilchards, like
other people, will give their oppressors the
slip if they can; and the huer has to so
manage that the shoal may be intercepted
just at the right time and place—a feat which
calls forth all his keenness and judgment,
and implicit obedience on the part of the
men in the boats. It is a momentous
period, too, for the numerous watchers
on the beach; since their cupboards and
their pockets are likely to be influenced
by the result. The huer has seen the
shoal, and has made his calculations as to
time and space; he gives a signal for the
boatmen to weigh anchor, and to remove the
tarpaulin which covers the seine; he signals
again, and overboard goes the seine: the
light edge being managed by one man, and
the heavy edge by another. The warps at
two corners ot the seine have previously been
fastened to a buoy; and as the position of the
seine at one end is thus determined, the boat
rows along to carry out the other end; some
of them pull, while two others throw the
seine overboard, as fast as the boat progresses;
and the bow-oarsman directs their movements
in accordance with the signals made
by the huer. The object is, of course, to
oppose a barrier to the farther progress of
the shoal; to aid in this object, the men
in the cock-boat take up a position between
the seine and the buoy, and beat the water
with their oars, to frighten the fish, and
prevent them from passing by the edge of the
seine, a crafty mode of driving the poor
little fish from sham danger into real. The
movements are so managed that the seine is
brought round in a curved line, until the two
ends meet, and thus enclose the shoal—the
whole being imprisoned in a circular net-like
wall; for, the leaded edge rests upon the
sandy bottom of the bay, and the cock-boat
holds sentry over the only possible point of
escape—the junction of the two ends of the
seine.

The pilchards are arrested in their course,
perhaps to the extent of thousands of
hogsheads, and the men give three jolly cheers to
announce their luck. Then comes the next
task the lifting of the pilchards out of the
water. This is effected by the aid of the
tuck-seine. As low tide approaches, boats
congregate around in great numbers, and the
men prepare. The volyer, or following boat,
goes within the circle formed by the stop-
seine, and lays the tuck-seine round within
the circle. The two ends of the tuck-seine
are then drawn together in such a way as to
tuck or coop up the poor pilchards in a
narrower and narrower space, and to raise them
from the bottom. The fish are terribly
frightened, and jump and flout about: but
fruitlessly; they become collected in the
hollow bunt of the tuck-seine. They are
raised gradually and cautiously to the
surface; they are laded out by the men with
flaskets, and are thrown in a silvery shower
into the boats which crowd around. The
number enclosed within the stop-seine may
be so large that the tuck-seine could not
hold them, or the boats could not hold
them, or the persons on shore could not
salt and cure them. In such case, the tuck-
seine brings up only a portion at a time;
and some of the pilchards may remain a
week or more in their prison. They do not
necessarily suffer from this, however, as
they are floating about in their own native
element. Sometimes, meanwhile, there is a
busy throng of small boats surrounding the
seine, each ready to take its load to the beach;
and the scene is then not a little striking and
animated.

But, the seine method is not the only one
adopted: many of the fishers find it more
convenient to employ the drift method.
Here, we may remark that while some learned
pundits use the words seine and shoal, others
say sean and schull: we shall adhere to our
own usage, without pretending to say which is
the better of the two. In the drift method,
tifteen or twenty drift-nets are fastened end
to end; and as they are upwards of a
hundred feet long, the whole may extend
nearly half a mile, and in some cases three-
quarters. The nets are about forty feet deep.
The string of nets has a corked rope running
along the top, and a strengthening rope running
along the middle, but no leaded rope at the
bottom. The nets are carried in fishing-boats, each
having four men and a boy. A line from one
end of the head-rope is fastened over the
quarter of the boat; and the nets, being
turned overboard, are left to float with the
tide. The corks and the buoys are so managed
that the upper edge of the nets is twelve or
fifteen feet below the surface of the water;
so that ships may pass over the nets without
injuring them. The men shoot the nets a
little before sunset and again as dawn
approaches: making two hauls, and sometimes
two good captures, in a night.

Mr. Yarrell, a great authority in piscatorial
lore, states that, in eighteen hundred and
twenty-seven, when the parliamentary bounty
began to be withdrawn, the men and capital
employed in the Cornish pilchard-fishery were
as follows. There were rather more than
three hundred seines; there were about
four thousand three hundred men employed
afloat, and six thousand three hundred
employed on shore, making ten thousand six