About a mile down the flat, between very high banks, our principal
creek ran, and to a quiet spot among the flax-bushes we directed our
steps. By the fast-fading light the gentlemen set their lines in
very primitive fashion. On the crumbling, rotten earth the New
Zealand flax, the _Phormium tenax_, loves to grow, and to its long,
ribbon-like leaves the eel-fishers fastened their lines securely,
baiting each alternate hook with mutton and worms. I declared this
was too cockney a method of fishing, and selected a tall slender
flax-stick, the stalk of last year's spike of red honey-filled
blossoms, and to this extempore rod I fastened my line and bait.
When one considers that the old whalers were accustomed to use ropes
made in the rudest fashion, from the fibre of this very plant, in
their deep-sea fishing for very big prey, it is not surprising that
we found it sufficiently strong for our purpose. 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