300 LITTLE FOLKS 
STORY OF A FOREIGN VISITOR. 
It is no Grandee with great string of servants that I mean, but 
an individual you all know very well, who has been in your house, 
and at your table {on your table, perhaps I ought to say) dozens of 
times. 
Some of you don't like him very well, and I must admit that 
when we 'see him flattened out and sprawled wide open, dry and 
salt as he can be, he doesn't look as if he was anybody in particular. 
But he was once a very lively resident of the coast of Labra- 
dor or New Foundland. There he spent his summers with thousands 
of his friends and relatives in a most delightful manner, for like 
other fashionables, he had his summer resort. 
There he might have lived happily till this day, but unfortu- 
nately his flesh is good to eat, and so every summer, hundreds and 
thousands of vessels fill up with salt and barrels, fish hooks and 
lines, bait and men, and spend the whole summer enticing the 
innocent members of this family into their vessels, where they meet 
with most uncivil treatment, and become the flattened out fellows 
we buy at the grocery. 
Cod fish? Yes, of course it's a Cod fish, though why we 
should say "Cod fish" any more than "trout fish," I'm sure I'd like 
to know. 
I must tell you about this hunting. When the boats get into 
the neighborhood of the fishing ground, everything is made ready. 
Each man has three or four feet of the edge of the vessel for his 
use, and his line is all ready on a reel, while barrels of bait stand 
handy. Think of needing barrels of bait, you boys who carry all 
you want in a tin spice-box ! 
The bait, too, is different from yours. Sometimes soft-shell 
crab, sometimes small fish, which they catch in nets, and again, 
chun 1 s of the Cod themselves. 
The fish go in crowds — shoals, they call it — and the instant 
one is seen, every man springs to his place, and throws out his line. 
From that moment, as long as a fish will bite, they never leave their 
post. What they eat, if they eat anything, is brought to them by 
the cook. 
