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I had every sort of fishing-tackle in abundance, and both the colonel and Owen had complete outfits of rods and reels, with a vast variety of lines, hooks, squids, sinkers, gaffs, and landing-nets. Each of them had two sporting pieces, and all the equipments of a hunter. Before six in the morning, the mules appeared on the wharf, drawing the wagons, which were nothing but "hay-riggings."
Indeed, I have had two thunderbolts shown me at once, one of which was a large belemnite, and the other a modern Indian tomahawk. Curiously enough, English sailors still call the nearest surviving relatives of the belemnites, the squids or calamaries of the Atlantic, by the appropriate name of sea-arrows.
If I had worked my way from a sponge instead of a lobster, I should have found it associated, by like ties, with a great number of other animals into the sub-kingdom Protozoa; if I had selected a fresh-water polype or a coral, the members of what naturalists term the sub-kingdom Cælenterata would have grouped themselves around my type; had a snail been chosen, the inhabitants of all univalve and bivalve, land and water, shells, the lamp shells, the squids, and the sea-mat would have gradually linked themselves on to it as members of the same sub-kingdom of Mollusca; and finally, starting from man, I should have been compelled to admit first, the ape, the rat, the horse, the dog, into the same class; and then the bird, the crocodile, the turtle, the frog, and the fish, into the same sub-kingdom of Vertebrata.
Our fishing was to be done mainly by trolling, and as soon as we had our bait, Colonel Shepard had a mullet on one of his approved squids. We had a six-knot breeze, and I had to attend to the tiller. The bait was hardly in the water before the Colonel began to tug at his line. I saw a large fish break in the water, a hundred feet from the boat, and "cut up" in the most extraordinary manner.
"I should say not," laughed Rob; "and besides all that, I've got lots of lines and squids, and the blues and mackerel are running good." "Can't I take along my twenty-two rifle that island's just swarming with rabbits, and I think I heard some quail when we were there the other day," pleaded Merritt. "Not in season," answered Rob laconically. "Laws not up on them till November."
The stage driver laughed and aimed more chewing tobacco at that innocent front wheel; and the question drew out such a story of heroism in spite of the damn't's and the tobacco squids as made her proud of human clay, just as she had been ashamed of human something or other inside the stage with the lavender silk and the gold teeth and Bat's frozen tallow smile.
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