304 LITTLE FOLKS 
At one port, often a thousand hogsheads of Pilchards and 
Sprat are caught in one day. Pilchards and Sprat, you must know, 
are baby Herrings. At least the wise men who know most about 
fish suppose them to be. Some of them you have seen, packed as 
tight as they can be, in small tin boxes, and called sardines. 
, But I must tell you what is done to the fish when the boat 
reaches shore in the morning. In some places they are first put 
into large troughs and sprinkled with salt. Then the curers take 
them, clean and throw them into huge tubs, with more salt. From 
there the packers quickly pack them into barrels. They are hardly 
ten minutes going from the boats to the barrels. 
In other places the process is different. As soon as the boat 
touches land, men jump in with large wooden shovels, and shovel 
out the beautiful little fellows into wheelbarrows. They look very 
comical up to their knees in fish. 
When a wheelbarrow is full, it goes at once to the salting 
house. A lively place that is, for there are hundreds of women 
and girls, making a neat stack of fish and salt, and — of course — 
talking and laughing as fast as they work. The stack is a big one, 
twenty feet long, four feet wide, and as high as they can comfort- 
ably reach. First — on the floor — a layer of salt, then a layer of 
fish, that's the way it's done. And when done, it looks funny 
enough — like a mound of salt, with tiny noses and tails sticking 
out all over it. 
The little fellows are left here for five or six weeks, and no 
wonder they come out brown and withered up. I guess you'd be 
brown and withered up yourself, if you lay in salt for six weeks. 
The salt draws out the oil and water, and they drain off into places 
fixed for them. From this stack, the fish are packed in hogsheads, 
and sent off. 
If the fish are little, and to be made into sardines, they are 
fixed in still another way. First, they are well washed in sea 
water, and sprinkled with salt. Then the heads are cut off, split 
open, and hung up to dry. After drying they have a short baih in 
boiling oil, and are laid on a grating to drain. From the grating 
they go into tin boxes, and when the boxes are opened, and a nice 
sliced lemon laid on the fish, I guess you all know what becomes 
of them. From the coast of Brittany, ten millions of boxes are 
sent every year. 
Even the Indians wha live near the sea-shore catch Herring. 
