THE FISHERIES. 63 



business ; for while we are debating the matter, our 

 people are quitting our shores, or crowding towards 

 the poor-house. If any means can be suggested to 

 put our fisheries in motion, we feel convinced they 

 will prosper from the starting-post, and be adequate 

 not only to the due supply of our provincial towns, 

 our poor-houses, and our population, from the coast 

 to the centre ; hut to export annually 500,000 bar- 

 rels of cured fish ; not one barrel less will satisfy us. 

 We shall begin our exposition with Howth, as we 

 are partial to its blue clifi's. We take upon us to 

 say there is not in the British empire, a town to sur- 

 pass Howth in all the concomitants of a first-class 

 fishing-station. Its harbour cost half a million; a 

 few miles in the ofiing a *' ball " of herrings, eight 

 or ten miles in length, and one or two miles in thick- 

 ness, moves annually along in its huge and mysterious 

 migration. The Cornishmen take a handful or two 

 out of them (some £20,000 or £30,000 worth) each 

 season, and then leave them unmolested to wend 

 their way in slow and successive shoals along our 

 coast. A railroad has its terminus close to the har- 

 bour ; we have stepped the distance, and it is just 

 forty paces from the turn-table of the terminus, to 

 the gunwale of the fishing-boat. Our Dubhn Bil- 

 lingsgate, the wholesale fish-market, is reached in 

 forty-five minutes, and, as a market, is not perhaps 

 equalled in advantages by any in Great Britain ; the 

 fish are sold by auction at an early hour to the trade, 

 and if a glut of herrings, salmon, turbot, or other 



