r can the peopling of many lands and the finding
and exploring of all continents and islands check this. However it
may be with the cattle it is this which gives tang to our salt hay
and touches the reviving coolness of the spray and the east wind
with the rainbow magic of dreams.

CHAPTER XIII

FISHING "DOWN OUTSIDE"

In the beginning of things were the cunners, known along
Massachusetts Bay mainly as perch. Names are good only in certain
localities. If you ask a Hingham boy how the cunners are biting he
will be likely to throw rounded beach stones at you, thinking he
is being made game of. Down at Newport, R. I., they catch cunners
and if you talk salt-water perch to them it is at your peril.
Elsewhere they are chogsett, or peradventure burgall, but
everywhere they are nippers and baitstealers, and the trait which
makes these names universal is the reason why in the beginning of
things were the cunners. For the first bait of the first fisherman
that ever threw hook into the North Atlantic was taken by a
cunner. There are today forty million, more or less, North
Atlantic fishermen who will corroborate this testimony with
personal experience. It may be that the first hook was taken by
some other fish, but the cunner got in ahead on the bait. The
cunner is not very large. He rarely tips the scales at a pound,
but he will eat his own weight in bait in a day and he is numerous
and pretty nearly omnipresent.

Wherever the salt tides flow, whether it be up the sandy stretches
of a clean bottomed cove, along the mud bottom of the creek, or
amid the red-brown tangle of kelp on some ledge awash a mile off
shore, there comes the cunner, suiting his color chameleon-like to
that of the bottom.

On the mud he is brown, on the sand gray, but if you wish to see
handsome creatures you must pull them from some bottom where the
red kelp grows. Then their rich bronzy reds will make you forget
their bait thievery and love them for their beauty.

If you will go back to Dombey and Son and read the description of
Mr. Carker you will realize that Dickens must have been fishing
off the ledges of some English headland when he planned that
gentleman and his characteristics. In whatever mood or from
whatever side Mr. Carker approaches you it is his teeth which
dominate the situation. I am convinced that every time Dickens
tried to make him otherwise he found another cunner tugging and
drew him up.

Judging by Carker it must h