6 THE LAND'S END 



perhaps even better by night when the narrow 

 crooked ways are very dark except at some rare spot 

 where a lamp casts a mysterious light on some quaint 

 old corner building and affords a glimpse into a dimly- 

 seen street beyond ending in deep gloom. 



In this nest or hive are packed about eight hundred 

 fishermen with their wives and children, their old 

 fathers and mothers, and other members of the com- 

 munity who do not go in the boats. The fishermen 

 are the most interesting in appearance ; it is a relief, 

 a positive pleasure to see in England a people clothed 

 not in that ugly dress which is now so universal, but 

 in one suitable to their own life and work their 

 ponderous sea-boots and short shirt-shaped oilies of 

 many shades of colour from dirty white and pale 

 yellow to deep reds and maroons. In speech and 

 manners they are rough and brusque, and this, too, 

 like their dress and lurching gait, comes, as it were, 

 by nature ; for of all occupations, this of wresting a 

 poor and precarious livelihood from the wind-vexed 

 seas under the black night skies in their open boats is 

 assuredly the hardest and most trying to a man's 

 temper. The navvy and the quarryman, the labourer 

 on the land, here where the land is half rock, even 

 the tin-miner deep down in the bowels of the earth, 

 have a less discomfortable and anxious life. That 

 they are not satisfied with it one soon discovers ; 

 Canada calls them, and Africa, and other distant 

 lands, and unhappily, as in most places, it is always 

 the best men that go. Possibly this accounts for the 

 change for the worse in the people which some have 



