of each craft is at his own helm, roaring out orders, and eagerly watchful of the lights of his encroaching neighbors.  With the schooner heeled over to leeward, and rushing along through the blackness, the boats are launched, and the men tumble over the side into them, until perhaps the cook, the boy, and the skipper are alone on deck.  One big boat, propelled by ten stout oarsmen, carries the seine, and with one dory is towed astern the schooner until the school is overhauled, then casts off and leaps through the water under the vigorous tugs of its oarsmen.  In the stern a man stands throwing over the seine by armsful.  It is the plan of campaign for the long boat and the dory, each carrying one end of the net, to make a circuit of the school, and envelope as much of it as possible in the folds of the seine.  Perhaps at one time boats from twenty or thirty schooners will be undertaking the same task, their torches blazing, their helmsmen shouting, the oars tossing phosphorescent spray into the air.  In and out among the boats the schooners pick their way—­a delicate task, for each skipper wishes to keep as near as possible to his men, yet must run over neither boats or nets belonging to his rival.  Wonderfully expert helmsmen they become after years of this sort of work—­more trying to the nerves and exacting quite as much skill as the “jockeying” for place at the start of an international yacht race.

When the slow task of drawing together the ends of the seine until the fish are fairly enclosed in a sort of marine canal, a signal brings the schooner down to the side of the boats.  The mackerel are fairly trapped, but the glare of the torches blinds them to their situation, and they would scarcely escape if they could.  One side of the net is taken up on the schooner’s deck, and there clamped firmly, the fish thus lying in the bunt, or pocket between the schooners, and the two boats which lie off eight or ten feet, rising and falling with the sea.  There, huddled together in the shallow water, growing ever shallower as the net is raised, the shining fish, hundreds and thousands of them, bushels, barrels, hogsheads of them, flash and flap, as the men prepare to swing them aboard in the dip net.  This great pocket of cord, fit to hold perhaps a bushel or more, is swung from the boom above, and lowered into the midst of the catch.  Two men in the boat seize its iron rim, and with a twist and shove scoop it full of mackerel.  “Yo-heave-oh” sing out the men at the halliards, and the net rises into the air, and swings over the deck of the schooner.  Two men perched on the rail seize the collar and, turning it inside out, drop the whole finny load upon the deck.  “Fine, fat, fi-i-ish!” cry out the crew in unison, and the net dips back again into the corral for another load.  So, by the light of smoky torches, fastened to the rigging, the work goes on, the men singing and shouting, the tackle creaking, the waves splashing, the wind singing in