THEIR ROUND OF LIFE AND LABOUR. 51 
consider it the very best bait for the purposes of fish 
capture. The labour endured was all the harder, as the 
women and children often required to trudge a distance of 
four or five miles, and then having filled their creels with 
the coveted mollusk they had to walk home again with 
their heavy loads, after which each family would have to 
bait perhaps a thousand hooks to be ready against the time 
of the men’s departure to the fishery. Now, when all the 
accessible mussel supplies have been used up, the men 
have to procure their bait from private mussel-beds, going 
as far for it as the Clyde, or the Humber, and, what is of 
importance to them, they have to pay for what they require, 
which being taken into account with the time required to 
make a run to the Humber or the Clyde from the Firth of 
Forth, considerably diminishes their earnings. It is sur- 
prising the fishermen of Scotland do not manage to make a 
“new departure” in the matter of bait ; there are other baits 
that would attract the fish as much as the mussel, such as 
acut of herring or some other fish.* The Dutch, for instance, 
who are industrious fishers, use the valuable Lampern very 
largely, for the purpose of baiting their hooks, importing it 
even from the coast of England, whilst the Americans 
find excellent bait in the Menhaden. It is surely a curious 
incident of fishing economy that our men should export bait 
lamperns to Holland and import mussels from Hamburg! 
But if the Scottish fishermen who are slow to change will 
insist upon having mussels at all times for bait, they should 
* They are now, we are glad to learn, finding out that the White 
fish when hungry, which is always, are not particular as to their food. 
The codfish is said to subsist mostly on herrings. Why then do not 
our fisher folk use the herring more liberally than they do as bait? It 
would surely pay them well, on the principle of throwing a sprat to catch 
a whale to buy two pennyworth of herring to capture two shillings’ 
worth of cod or ling. 
BZ 
