dripping up the side of the vessel from his briny pastures.  Silver is the pervading gleam of his oval form; but while he is yet wet and fresh, the silver is flushed with a chromatic radiance of gold, and violet, and pale metallic green, all blending and harmonizing like the mother-o’-pearl lustre in some rare sea-shell.  The true value of this fish is not of a commercial kind, for he cannot be deemed particularly exquisite in a gastronomic sense; neither is he staple as a provision of food.  His virtue lies in the inducement offered to him by the citizen of moderate means, who, for a trifling outlay, can secure for himself and family the invigorating influence of the salt sea-breezes, by having a run down outside the Hook any fine day in summer, with an object.  The average weight of the porgy of these banks may be set down at about a pound.

Five minutes after we came to anchor, there must have been at least two hundred and fifty whip-cord lines stretching out into the three-fathom water from every available rail and fender of the old boat.  Most of the men had brought their tackle with them, and their tin canisters of bait.  To those who had not, the articles were ready at hand; for speculators had mingled in the crowd, one of whom affixed his “shingle” to a post between-decks, setting forth,—­“Fishing-Lines and Hooks, with Sinkers and Bait,”—­the latter consisting of clams in the shell, contained in a barrel big enough for the supply of the whole flotilla of green boats and red shirts, which still hung around us like swallows in the wake of an osprey.  Two or three of our excursionists—­men, perhaps, whose minds indulged in dear memories of a brook that babbles by a mill—­had fishing-rods with them, and made great ado with scientific lunges and casts, producing much discord, indeed, by flicking away wildly outside their proper sea-limits.  Most industrious among the hand-fishers I remarked a small, spare man, who, under the careful supervision of a buxom young wife in a “loud” tartan silk, baited no hook nor broke water with his lead until he had first folded and put carefully away between the handle and lid of the family prog-basket his tight little black frock-coat, and passed his small legs through the tough creases of a pair of stout blue “Denim” overalls.  These, pulled up to his neck, and hitched on there with shoulder-straps, served for waistcoat and trousers and all, imparting to him the cool atmospheric effect so much admired in that curious picture of Gainsborough’s, known to connoisseurs as “The Blue Boy.”  Then he fished the waters with a will; and it was but a scurvy remark of Flashy Joe, who said that “it was about an even chance whether he took porgy or porgy took him.”  But it seems to me that this unskilled labor of fishing from a steamboat must be epidemic, if not contagious; for even Young New York, who in the early forenoon doubted visibly his discretion at having got himself into such an ugly scrape as an “excursion-spree,” put off his delicate gloves, and set to hauling, hand over hand, as if for a bet.