ITALIAN FABLE. 319 



scale. And this external order is only the index of a still more 

 important change in the habits and character of our fisher-toun, 

 the population of which, all who know it agree in testifying, 

 has within the past few years undergone a remarkable change 

 for the better in a moral point of view. Especially is this 

 noticed in the care of their children, whose education might, in 

 some cases, bring a tinge of shame to the cheek of well-to-do 

 town's folks. . Go down to the &her squares, and lay hold of 

 some little fellow hardly able to waddle about without assist- 

 ance in his thick made-down moleskins, and you will find he 

 has the Shorter Catechism at his tongue-end. Ask any 

 employer of labour in the neighbourhood of the shore where he 

 gets his best apprentices, and he will teU 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 wiU find that they have been divided among other families 

 in the square, and treated by the heads of these families as 

 aflfectionately 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-viUage, 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 famUy 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 retailing 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." 



