The cruise of the “Lotus” had its redeeming features, though they were probably unrecorded at the time.  There was fishing and boating; rambles on shore over the grassy hills; a search for clams and a good old-fashioned clam bake; to which the sharpest appetites did ample justice; and there were quiet fellows, who stole apart from the rioters and had hours of solid satisfaction.  You may have rocked in a small skiff yourself, casting your line in deep water, waiting and watching for the cod to bite.  It is pleasant sculling up to a distant point, and sounding by the way so as to get off the sand and over the pebbly bottom as soon as possible.  It is pleasant to cast anchor and float a few rods from shore, where the rocks are eaten away by the tides of numberless centuries, where the swallows build and the goats climb, and the scrub oaks look over into the sea, with half their hairy roots trailing in the air.  It is less pleasant to thread your hook with a piece of writhing worm that is full of agonizing expression, though head and tail are both missing and writhing on their own hooks, which are also attached to your line.  I wonder if one bit of worm on a hook recognizes a joint of itself on the next hook, and says to it, in its own peculiar fashion, “Well, are you alive yet?”

The baiting accomplished, with a great flourish you throw your sinker, and see it bury itself in the muddy water; then you listen intently, for the least suggestion of a disturbance down there at the other end of the line; the sinker thumps upon this rock and the next one, drops into a hole and gets caught for a moment, but is loosened again, and then a sort of galvanic shock thrills through your body; on guard! if you would save your bait; another twinge, fainter than the first, and at last a regular tug, and you haul in your line, which is jerking incessantly by this time.  The next moment the hooks come to the surface, and on one of them you find a Lilliputian fish that is not yet old enough to feed himself, and was probably caught by accident.

Perhaps you haul in your line as fast as you can, bait it and throw it in again as rapidly as convenient—­for this is the sport that fishermen love to boast of; perhaps you rock in your boat all day, and draw but a half-dozen of these shiners out before their time, and waste your precious worms to no purpose.

It’s hungry work, isn’t it? and the summons to dinner that is by-and-by sounded from the yacht is a pleasing excuse for deserting so profitless a task.  The right thing to do, however, is to put on an appearance of immense success whenever a rival skiff comes within hail.  You hold up your largest fish several times in succession, so as to delude the anxious inquirers in the other boat, who will of course think you have a dozen of those big cod with a striking family resemblance.  It is a very successful ruse; all fishermen indulge in it, and you have as good a right to play the pantomime as they.