perpetually with his whip-cord line in the shallow water that washed the
slimy face-timbers of the wharf. There he sat, day after day, and
all day, and, for aught I know, all through the summer-night, a
big-timbered, sea-worthy man, reading contentedly a daily paper of local
growth, and pulling up never a better bit of sea-luck than the puny,
mean-spirited fishling called by unscientific persons the _burgall_.
I would at any time have freely given ten cents for the privilege of
overhauling old broad-beam's carpet-bag, which he always placed before
him on the string-piece, with a view, I suppose, of frustrating anything
like a guerrilla plunder-movement upon his widely extended rear. Ay,
there must be something strangely entrancing in dragging the shoal
waters with a hand-line, for unsuspicious, easily duped members of the
acanthopterygian tribe of fishes,--under which alarming denomination
come, I believe, nearly all the finny fellows to be met with on these
sand-banks, from the bluefish to the burgall. Only think how stuck up
they would be above the lowly mollusks of the same waters, if they
knew themselves as Acanthopterygii, and were aware that their
great-grandfather was an Acanthopteryx before them, and so away back in
the age of waters that once were over all! "Very ancient and fish-like"
is their genealogy, to be sure!

In the far-away days, when Neversink _was_, but the twin beacon-towers
that now watch upon its heights were _not_,--when Sandy Hook was a hook
only, and not a telegraph-station, from which the first glimpse of an
inward-bound argosy is winked by lightning right in at the window of the
down-town office where Mercator sits jingling the coins in his trousers'
pockets,--in those days, the only excursion-boats that rocked upon the
ground-swell over the pale, sandy reaches of the Fishing-Banks were the
tiny barklets that shot out on calm days from the sweeping coves, with
their tawny tarred-and-feathered crews: for of such grotesque result of