In the far-away days, when Neversink _was_, but the twin beacon-towers that now watch upon its heights were _not_,--when Sandy Hook was a hook only, and not a telegraph-station, from which the first glimpse of an inward-bound argosy is winked by lightning right in at the window of the down-town office where Mercator sits jingling the coins in his trousers' pockets,--in those days, the only excursion-boats that rocked upon the ground-swell over the pale, sandy reaches of the Fishing-Banks were the tiny barklets that shot out on calm days from the sweeping coves, with their tawny tarred-and-feathered crews: for of such grotesque result of the decorative art of Lynch doth ever remind me the noble Indian warrior in his plumes and paint. Unfitted, by the circumscribed character of their sea-craft, their tackle, and their skill, for pushing their enterprise out into the deeper water, where the shark might haply say to the horse-mackerel,--"Come, old horse, let you and me hook ourselves on, and take these foolish tawny fellows and their brown cockle-shell down into the under-tow,"--they supplied their primitive wants by enticing from the shallows the beautiful, sunny-scaled shoal-fish, well named by ichthyologists _Argyrops_, the "silver-eyed." But the poor Indian, who knew no Greek,--poor old savage, lament for him with a scholarly _eheu!_--called this shiner of the sea, in his own barbarous lingo, _Scuppaug_. Can any master of Indian dialects tell us whether that word, too, means "him of the silver eye"? If it does, revoke, O student, your shrill _eheu_ for the Greekless and untrousered savage of the canoe, suppress your feelings, and go steadily into rhabdomancy with several divining-rods, in search of the Pierian spring which must surely exist somewhere among the guttural districts of the Ojibbeway tongue.