200 WATERSIDE SKETCHES. 



of women to give savour to the salt of home. I could in 

 this paragraph draw a vivid portrait of a being who watches 

 the footsteps of nightfall one after another upon the water 

 on a Sunday evening about four-and-twenty miles east of 

 Yarmouth, with a dismal sense of the falsity of poetical 

 pictures of things pertaining to the maritime profession. 

 He sits shivering and ill at ease, overcome by qualms with 

 which conscience has nothing to do ; a limp object on a 

 sail behind the tiller handle, feebly noticing that the bow of 

 the vessel is sometimes high in the air and the next moment 

 down at the end of a slippery incline. Through his heavy 

 head scraps of sea balladry are blown like flakes of foam by 

 the blast. He vows never again to perpetuate the heresy 

 contained in the fiction, " Rock'd in the cradle of the deep." 

 He scoffs at the bard who found something to sing about in 

 " the odour of brine from the ocean." He grins with ghastly 

 expression when, noticing the lowered mainmast, the pretty 

 words, " he climbs the mast to feast his eyes once more," 

 are shaken uppermost. He is especially hurt to think that 

 even the oblivion of actual sea-sickness is denied him. Such 

 a sketch I might limn for the amusement of the callous ; 

 but I forbear. 



The herrings have not behaved as we had fondly hoped. 

 At eight o'clock a few fathoms of our two miles of net wall 

 are hauled in, just as the moon struggles out of a bank of 

 clouds, but there is no encouragement to proceed further. 

 Then the men disappear down the aperture of two feet 

 square into the small dark closet around which their berths 

 are hidden. The skipper, kind and thoughtful as a mother 

 to his " first-class passenger," insists upon offering him the 

 use of his bunk, and spreads him a brand new Union Jack 



