I picked out, therefore, a comfortable spot,--that is to say, well in the centre of a young flax-bush, whose satiny leaves made the most elastic cushions around me; with my flax-stick held out over what was supposed to be a favourite haunt of the eels, and with Nettle asleep at my feet and a warm shawl close to my hand, prepared for my vigil.

"Don't speak or move," were the gentlemen's last words: "the eels are all eyes and ears at this hour; they can almost hear you breathe." Each man then took up his position a few hundred yards away from me, so that I felt, to all intents and purposes, absolutely alone.

I am "free to confess," as our American cousins say, that it was a very eerie sensation.

It was now past ten o'clock; the darkness was intense, and the silence as deep as the darkness.
Hot as the day had been, the night air felt chill, and a heavy dew began to fall, showing me the wisdom of substituting woollen for cotton garments.

I could see the dim outlines of the high hills, which shut in our happy valley on all sides, and the smell of the freshly-turned earth of a paddock near the house, which was in process of being broken up for English grass, came stealing towards me on the silent air.