FRESH AND SALT. 189 



fumed and fretted, and have been only comforted with the 

 reflection that the liggering parties whom I had seen drink- 

 ing bottled beer, and singing songs on the water, had not 

 caught a fish between a score of them. Perhaps if I had gone 

 to Buckenham or Cantley it might have turned out differ- 

 ently, for on my return to town a friend compared notes with 

 me, and I learned that on these very days he caught four 

 pounds short of a hundred weight of roach at the former 

 place, where the tide flows faintly and where the fish hap- 

 pened to be on the feed. 



" Patience that lasts three days," think I, looking out at 

 eventide upon Yarmouth market-place, "has a right to get 

 rusty at last ; and to-morrow, behold ! I pack up my effects 

 and flee on the wings of the morning." 



Then it was that there flashed into my despondent mind 

 the grand discovery recorded in the first sentence of this 

 chapter ; then it was I started forthwith to Gorleston to hold 

 conference with a good motherly matron who owned a good 

 fatherly husband, who, in his turn, owned a good weatherly 

 fishing vessel ; and thus it was that I spent a night with the 

 Herring Fleet, to give the salt water an opportunity of 

 courteously recompensing me for the deceptions and 

 coquetry of the rivers and Broads. 



" You'll find it rough accommodation on board the Sea- 

 bird, sir, but we'll make you as comfortable as we can," I 

 am told next morning on appearing alongside, according to 

 arrangement. 



And what more can I expect ? Beggars, says the pro- 

 verb, are not precisely in the position of choosers, and I 

 have begged from the owner of the Seahird the privilege of 

 a passage during one of her herring-fishing excursions. The 



