Five minutes after midnight of St. John's--24th to 25th of June, commences the great Herring Fishery, in the North Seas. Phosphoric lights gleam and flash upon the waters, and from deck to deck is heard the hearty hail, "Look out, there! The _Herring lightning_!" And a real, and a vast lightning that is, as from the depths that vast mass of life springs upward in eager quest of heat, light, and dalliance. The soft, pale, silvery light of the Moon is well pleasing to that timorous host; a beacon to guide them to their great banquet of Love. Upward they spring, one and all; not one idler or straggler remains behind. Gregariousness is the fixed rule, the indefeasible law of that race; you never see them but in shoals. In shoals they lie buried in the vast dark depths, and in shoals they come to the surface to take their summer part in the universal joy, to see the light, to revel--and to die. Packed, squeezed, crushed, layer on layer, it seems that they never can be close enough, they swim in such compact masses that the Dutch fishermen compare them to their own Dykes--afloat! Between Scotland, Holland and Norway, one might fancy that an immense island had suddenly risen, and that a whole continent was about to arise. One division detaches itself eastward, and chokes up the Baltic sound. In some of the narrower straits you actually cannot row, so dense and solid is the mass of fish. Millions, tens of millions, tens of thousands of millions;--who can even guess at the number of those hosts upon hosts? It is on record that on one occasion, near Havre, one fisherman, on one morning, found in his nets no fewer than eight hundred thousand; and in Scotland, the mighty mass of eleven thousand barrels was taken in a single night! They come as a blinded and doomed prey; no amount of destruction can discourage them. Constantly preyed upon alike by fish and by men, they still come on in myriad shoals. And no marvel either; for they love and multiply, even as they move. Kill them as fast as we may, they just as fast reproduce; their vast, deep columns, even as they float along, give themselves wholly up to the great work of reproduction. The wave of the sea and the electric wave impel that whole vast mass at every instant. No weariness, no satiety, no weakness, not even a pause, take one where you will and it either has just propagated, is propagating, or is about to propagate. In that vast polygamous host, pleasure is an adventure and love a navigation. Over every league of its passage it pours out its torrents of fecundity. At some two or three fathoms deep the water is completely discolored by the incredible abundance of the Herring-spawn; and at sunrise, far as the eye can reach, you may see the water whitened with the marvellous abundance of the thick, fat, viscuous billows in which life is fermenting into new life. Over hundreds of square leagues it seems as though a volcano of teeming and fecund milk had burst forth and overwhelmed the sea.