eck
the yellow sands. Seen across the dancing waves, and with the appearance
of motion which, in this steaming land, the heat-haze gives to even
inanimate objects, this scene is indescribably pretty, shining and
alive.

But at dawn the prospect is different. The background is the same, but
the colour of the scene is less intense, though the dark waves have rosy
lights in them reflected from the ruddy sky of the dawn. A slowly paling
fire shines here and there upon the shore, and the cool land breeze
blows seaward. Borne upon the wind come stealing out a hundred graceful,
noiseless fishing smacks. The men aboard them are cold and sleepy. They
sit huddled up in the stern, with their _sarongs_ drawn high about their
shoulders, under the shadow of the palm-leaf sail, which shows dark
above them in the faint light of early morning. The only sound is the
whisper of the wind in the rigging, and the song of the forefoot as it
drives the water before it in little curving ripples. And so the fleet
floats out and out, and presently is lost on the glowing eastern
sky-line. At sundown the boats come racing back, heading for the
sinking sun, borne on the evening wind, which sets steadily shorewards,
and at about the same hour the great seine-boats, with their crews of
labouring paddlers, beat out to sea.

So live they, so die they, year in and year out. Toiling and enduring,
with no hope or wish for change of scene. Delighting in such simple
pleasures as their poor homes afford; surrounded by beauties of nature,
which they lack the soul to appreciate; and yet experiencing that keen
enjoyment which is born of dancing waves, of pace, of action, and of
danger, that thrilling throb of the red blood through the veins, which,
when all is said and done, makes up more than half of the joy of living.

It was not always so with them, for within the memory of old men upon
the Coast, the Fisher Folk were once pirates to a man. The last survivor
of those who formed the old lawless bands was an intimate friend of mine
own. When I last saw him, a day or two before his death in 1891, he
begged that I would do him one final act of friendship by supplying him
with a winding sheet, that he might go decently to his grave under the
sods and the spear-grass, bearing thither a token of the love I bore
him. It was a good shroud of fine white calico bought in the bazaar, and
it cost more than a dollar. But I found it very willingly, for I
remembered that