“Not a great few, sir; but we sees one now and then, and times we hear of one being ketched.”
“You mean dog-fish,” said Mr Temple.
“Oh no! I don’t, sir,” cried Josh. “Real sharks.”
“But only small ones.”
“Yes, sir, small ones, big as Will there, and big ones, great as me, and three foot longer. Shouldn’t wonder if there was a big one in the net.”
“But a large fish such as you speak of would go through the net as if it were a cobweb.”
Will shook his head.
“If the net was tight, sir, and the shark swam right at it, the meshes would give way; but they don’t seem to swim right at them, and the net goes with the fish like—yields to it—and does not break. It does sometimes, of course; but we’ve seen a big fish, a porpoise, regularly rolled up in a net and tied in so that it couldn’t move.”
“Like a conger in a trammel,” assented Josh. “Fish is very stoopid, sir, and never thinks of getting out the way they go in.”
All this while the seine was being contracted and drawn into the boat, where it was laid up like some gigantic brown skein, the men who were gathering it in shaking out the sea-weed and small fish that had enmeshed themselves and had forced their unfortunate heads in beyond the gills.