452 ITALIAN FABLE. [CHAP. x. 



moleskins, and you will find he has the Shorter Catechism at 

 his tongue-end. Ask any employer of labour in the neighbour- 

 hood of the shore where he gets his best apprentices, and he 

 will tell you that for industry and integrity he finds no lads 

 who surpass those from the fisher squares. Inquire about 

 the families of the fishermen who have lost their lives while 

 following their perilous occupation, and you will find that 

 they have been divided among other families in the square, 

 and treated by the heads of these families as affectionately as 

 if they had been their own." 



As regards the constant intermarrying of the fisher class, 

 and the working habits of their women, I have read an Italian 

 fable to the following effect: "A man of distinction, in 

 rambling one day through a fishing-village, accosted one of 

 the fishermen with the remark that he wondered greatly that 

 men of his line of life should chiefly confine themselves, in 

 their matrimonial connections, to women of their own caste, and 

 not take them from other classes of society, where a greater 

 security would be obtained for their wives keeping a house 

 properly, and rearing a family more in accordance with the 

 refinement and courtesies of life. To this the fisherman replied, 

 that to him, and men of his laborious profession, such wives 

 as they usually took were as indispensable to their vocation 

 as their boat and nets. Their wives took their fish to market, 

 obtained bait for their lines, mended their nets, and performed 

 a thousand different and necessary things, which husbands 

 could not do for themselves, and which women taken from any 

 other of the labouring classes of society would be unable to do. 

 ' The labour and drudgery of our wives,' continued he, ' is a 

 necessary part of our peculiar craft, and cannot by any means 

 be dispensed with, without entailing irreparable injury upon 

 our social interests.' MORAL. This is one among many 

 instances, where the solid and the useful must take precedence 

 of the showy and the elegant." 



