=--"When the chill of the ice is out of the river
and the snow and frost out of the air, the fishermen along the shore
are on the lookout for the first arrival of shad. A few days of warm
south wind the latter part of April will soon blow them up; it is
true also, that a cold north wind will as quickly blow them back.
Preparations have been making for them all winter. In many a
farm-house or other humble dwelling along the river, the ancient
occupation of knitting of fish-nets has been plied through the long
winter evenings, perhaps every grown member of the household, the
mother and her daughters as well as the father and his sons, lending
a hand. The ordinary gill or drift-net used for shad fishing in the
Hudson is from a half to three-quarters of a mile long, and thirty
feet wide, containing about fifty or sixty pounds of fine linen twine,
and it is a labor of many months to knit one. Formerly the fish were
taken mainly by immense seines, hauled by a large number of men; but
now all the deeper part of the river is fished with the long, delicate
gill-nets that drift to and fro with the tide, and are managed by two
men in a boat.
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