Bluefisb and Blue Waters 191 



bunker, anyhow, that he should dare to question the 

 right of my lords of the sea and the shore ? And 

 then there are the slow, stiff-jointed things forever 

 crawling the sea-bottom. A heap of mossbunker 

 must eventually fall their way, and it saddens the 

 heart to think how they might never even get a 

 smell of mossbunker and the smell of some stages 

 of mossbunker is something like a smell ! were it 

 not for the charitable bluefish and his somewhat 

 reckless method of distributing things. 



The secret of Dame Nature's perfect success as 

 landlady of the Hotel Earth lies in the fact that she 

 never wastes anything. If there were the slightest 

 of wasteful methods, eventually there would be a 

 shortage, which there is not. There may be an 

 apparent shortage, an actual scarcity of one or many 

 forms of life, but that does not necessarily mean a 

 real decrease in the amount of life in the world. A 

 dead bluefish certainly means a gap in the ranks of 

 the blue host, but by no means a similar gap in the 

 marvellous plan of Nature. The bent-wing tern, the 

 crab sidling drunkenwise, or one or more of a host 

 of small creatures, may be that defunct bluefish done 

 up in another style of package. Our Puritan pro- 

 genitors were promiscuously planted upon certain 

 headlands of our older East. That those same head- 

 lands are none too fertile to-day is, perhaps, but natu- 

 ral, for the sainted forebears, according to reports, 

 were kind of lean and lacking in warmth and rich- 

 ness. Anyhow, be it meat, or meal, no truly scien- 

 tific mind ever would tolerate the idea that Standish 

 & Co. ever really ceased to do business at the old 

 stand. Unseen, unsuspected, they are to-day, as it 



