Another peril to the unwary are the catfish, unpleasant creatures, that have a playful knack of darting their poisonous spines into the flesh of any one incautiously touching them, thereby causing excruciating agony for some little time. Then come some little round fish, that have a very peculiar habit of swelling themselves out when touched, until they actually burst as it were with their own importance. I am not naturalist enough to tell the name of this peculiar fish, but the men used to call them ‘beadles.’ These and many others are thrown back into the sea as unfit for food; but even after this wholesale rejection, we have several buckets of good eatable fish, which are sent off to the fire, which is now blazing brightly on the strip of sand at the mouth of the river. A question now arises as to who shall be cook, and one of the men is promptly chosen by the others, and placed in charge of the fish. There is a joke about selecting this particular individual. Some months previously, in the course of a chaffing-match with the wardroom cook’s mate, he had made a retort so peculiarly cutting that the enraged knight of the gridiron applied an _argumentum ad hominem_ in the shape of a saucepan, which laid him on the deck with a broken head; so whenever there was a question of cooking to be done after this, he was invariably selected for the office, as the others said he must have gone deeply into the subject. We make cast after cast now, and fill all our spare buckets with fish, getting rather tired ourselves with the exertion of hauling a heavy net, up to our necks in water, till the night comes on apace, and we edge off towards the fire, making a final cast in front of it, as the glare attracts the fish in great numbers. We have become satiated with sport by this time; so the net is coiled up in the dingey, and all hands draw round the blazing fire; those that have taken the precaution to bring dry clothes now donning them; and the others, who have been less prudent, drying themselves in the grateful heat.