THEI ROUND OF LIFE AND LABOUR. 69 
of whom as a rule are good at their business, and many of 
them fish so near us that we are able to judge. The fisher- 
folk of France are much like their brethren of Scotland 
and Northumberland, superstitious and peculiar. The 
French have an extensive fishing fleet, over twenty-two 
thousand vessels, which require more than 80,000 fishermen 
to work them. As in Scotland, the French fishers are 
always aided in their business by their women folk, and in 
all fishing communities on the French coasts, the round of 
fisher life and labour is much the same as we know it at 
home, there are times of consuming anxiety for the women, 
when the men are at sea, and have been delayed in bringing 
home their catch by a sudden storm. The short and simple 
annals of fisher life in France, and other foreign lands, are 
as much tinged with melancholy, as the lives of the toilers of 
the sea on the coasts of Great Britain and Ireland. Each 
little village has experienced its terrible tragedies arising 
out of the fateful work of those who draw their daily bread 
from out the waters. 
Holland, the cradle of fishery enterprize, can of course 
boast of its fishwives ; the fishing villages on the sea board 
of the German Ocean, as well as those on the coast of the 
Zuyder Zee, are well worth a visit from the curious. The 
fisher quarter of Schevening is exceedingly quaint and 
peculiar, and the fishwives of Holland, and Belgium as 
well, are just as peculiar as those of the French or Scottish 
coasts, having their own specialties of living, and being 
largely imbued with the familiar superstitions of their 
eraft. We cannot say if a Dutch fishwife can find 
“tongues in trees” or “books in the running brooks,” but 
we do know that she can read the clouds and interpret the 
mists that veil the heavens: and the wailing of the water- 
fowl or the plaintive cry of the curlew will raise a vein of 
