One of the best fishing grounds about our coast was a spot just beyond the little sandy beach at the south of the island, where it joined the lava tract, a number of jagged rocks there jutting out of the cliff. We were able to leap from one to another of these rocks until we came to a somewhat larger one about fifty or sixty yards out to sea, to which fish, both large and small, seemed to be marvellously attracted. This rock appeared to us to be shaped like a mushroom, having a broad top rising a little in the middle, beneath which the fish lay, for forty winks, as Billy said. There was little rise and fall of the tide, but at flood the top of the rock was just awash, and it was covered with marine plants and limpets, which caused us to be very careful of our footing. Here we sometimes caught so great a quantity of fish that we had some trouble in carrying them ashore, so that we made it a practice after a time, whenever we went to this rock, to take with us a stout bag, made of a coarse broad grass that grew abundantly on the shore of the lake; and we placed our catch in this, and then, instead of springing from rock to rock, which had some peril, we being so laden, we attached a line to the bag, and hauled it ashore as soon as we reached the base of the cliff. We became, I say, fairly dexterous in course of time with our harpoons, which we lost now and again, in spite of all our care, when the fish we had speared were big ones, and too strong for us to hold. Once, indeed, I was dragged right into the water, a great fellow suddenly sounding when I had driven my harpoon home; and that time I not only got a thorough drenching and several bruises through falling on the rock, but lost fish, harpoon and line together. To prevent the like mishap from happening again, we accustomed ourselves to wind the end of the line about a spar of rock, so that if any fish proved too strong for us, either the line snapped or the harpoon became disengaged. In either of these cases, to be sure, we lost the fish, and if the line snapped we lost the harpoon as well; but we did have a security against being drawn into the sea ourselves, which in itself would have been a trifle, seeing that we could both swim and thought nothing of a wetting; but at certain seasons we had observed that sharks were numerous off the coast, and we had a great dread of being snapped up by one of these monsters, so that at such times we were careful not to go above our middle when we bathed. [Sidenote: A Shark]