at the store paid, and a few dollars over for necessaries during the winter.  In 1799, when the spokesmen of the fishery interests appeared before Congress to plead for aid, they brought papers from the town of Marblehead showing that the average earnings of the fishing vessels hailing from that port were, in 1787, $483; in 1788, $456; and in 1789, $273.  The expenses of each vessel averaged $275.  In the best of the three years, then, there was a scant $200 to be divided among the captain, the crew, and the owner.  This was, of course, one of the leanest of the lean years that the fishermen encountered; but with all the encouragement in the way of bounties and protected markets that Congress could give them, they never were able to earn in a life, as much as a successful promoter of trusts nowadays will make in half an hour.  The census figures of 1890—­the latest complete figures on occupations and earnings—­give the total value of American fisheries as $44,500,000; the number of men employed in them, 132,000, and the average earnings $337 a man.  The New England fisheries alone were then valued at $14,270,000.  In the gross total of the value of American fisheries are included many methods foreign to the subject of this book, as for example, the system of fishing from shore with pound nets, the salmon fisheries of the Columbia River, and the fisheries of the Great Lakes.

Mackerel are taken both with the hook and in nets—­taken in such prodigious numbers that the dories which go out to draw the seine are loaded until their gunwales are almost flush with the sea, and each haul seems indeed a miraculous draught of fishes.  It is the safest and pleasantest form of fishing known to the New Englander, for its season is in summer only; the most frequented banks are out of the foggy latitude, and the habit of the fish of going about in monster schools keeps the fishing fleet together, conducing thus to safety and sociability both.  In one respect, too, it is the most picturesque form of fishing.  The mackerel is not unlike his enemy, man, in his curiosity concerning the significance of a bright light in the dark.  Shrewd shopkeepers, who are after gudgeons of the human sort, have worked on this failing of the human family so that by night some of our city streets blaze with every variety of electric fire.  The mackerel fisherman gets after his prey in much the same fashion.  When at night the lookout catches sight of the phosphorescent gleams in the water that tells of the restless activity beneath of a great school of fish the schooner is headed straightway for the spot.  Perhaps forty or fifty other schooners will be turning their prows the same way, their red and green lights glimmering through the black night on either side, the white waves under the bows showing faintly, and the creaking of the cordage sounding over the waters.  It is a race for first chance at the school, and a race conducted with all the dash and desperation of a steeple-chase.  The skipper