Page:Twice-Told Tales (1851) vol 2.djvu/97

 perfumed with dead sculpins, hard-heads and dog-fish, strewn plentifully on the beach. You see, children, the village is but little changed, since your mother and I were young.

How like a dream it was, when I bent over a pool of water, one pleasant morning, and saw that the ocean had dashed its spray over me and made me a fisher man! There was the tarpaulin, the baize shirt, the oilcloth trousers and seven league boots, and there my own features, but so reddened with sunburn and sea breezes, that methought I had another face, and on other shoulders too. The seagulls and the loons, and I, had now all one trade; we skimmed the crested waves and sought our prey beneath them, the man with as keen enjoyment as the birds. Always when the east grew purple, I launched my dory, my little flat-bottomed skiff, and rowed cross-handed to Point Ledge, the Middle Ledge, or, perhaps, beyond Egg Rock; often, too, did I anchor off Dread Ledge, a spot of peril to ships unpiloted; and sometimes spread an adventurous sail and tracked across the bay to South Shore, casting my lines in sight of Scituate. Ere nightfall, I hauled my skiff high and dry on the beach, laden with red rock-cod, or the white bellied ones of deep water; haddock, bearing the black marks of Saint Peter's fingers near the gills; the long-bearded hake, whose liver holds oil enough for a midnight lamp; and now and then a mighty halibut, with a back broad as my boat. In the autumn, I toled and caught those lovely fish, the mackerel. When the wind was high,—when the whale boats, anchored off the Point, nodded their slender masts at each other, and the dories pitched