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 the decorative art of Lynch doth ever remind me the noble Indian warrior in his plumes and paint.  Unfitted, by the circumscribed character of their sea-craft, their tackle, and their skill, for pushing their enterprise out into the deeper water, where the shark might haply say to the horse-mackerel,—­“Come, old horse, let you and me hook ourselves on, and take these foolish tawny fellows and their brown cockle-shell down into the under-tow,”—­they supplied their primitive wants by enticing from the shallows the beautiful, sunny-scaled shoal-fish, well named by ichthyologists Argyrops, the “silver-eyed.”  But the poor Indian, who knew no Greek,—­poor old savage, lament for him with a scholarly eheu!—­called this shiner of the sea, in his own barbarous lingo, Scuppaug.  Can any master of Indian dialects tell us whether that word, too, means “him of the silver eye”?  If it does, revoke, O student, your shrill eheu for the Greekless and untrousered savage of the canoe, suppress your feelings, and go steadily into rhabdomancy with several divining-rods, in search of the Pierian spring which must surely exist somewhere among the guttural districts of the Ojibbeway tongue.

And here there is diversion for philologist as well as fisherman; for while the latter is catching the fish, the former may seize on the fact, that in this word, Scuppaug, is to be found the origin of the two separate names by which Argyrops, the silver-eyed, is miscalled in local vernacular.  True to the national proclivity for clipping names, the fishermen of Rhode Island appeal to him by the first syllable only of his Indian one,—­for in the waters thereabout he is talked of by the familiar abbreviation, Scup. But to the excursionists and fishermen of New York he is known only as Porgy, or Paugie, a form as obviously derived from the last syllable of his Indian name as the emphatic “siree” of our greatest orators is from the modest monosyllable “sir.” Porgy seems to be the accepted form of the word; but letters of the old, unphonetic kind are poor guides to pronunciation.  And a beautiful, clean-scaled fish is Porgy,—­whose g, by-the-by, as I learned from a funny man in the heterogeneous crowd, is pronounced “hard, as in ’git eowt.’” A lovely fish is he, as he comes