. Something like a half-mile farther eastward again you will
find another, both probably moraines of sand and gravel on the sea
bottom like those one finds ashore. These ridges the fish seem to
frequent rather than the valleys between, and if you will ease
your sheets and, setting your boat's prow a little off the wind,
drift slowly along these ridges, you will be able to cast your
lines among the best of the summer society. The cod go into things
only on the ground flood. It is a way substantial citizens have.
You will need to let your sinker strike bottom and then lift it a
little, but not too far. A greased lead dropped will show you a
variety of bottom. Here are rocks, about which especially the cod
congregate and where sometimes giant cunners dwell, there is a
sandy stretch which is beloved of the big flounders, which when
hooked make a gallant though unsteady fight before you get them
up.

I am always sorry for the flounder. He looks as if he might have
once been a fish of respectable, perhaps even beautiful shape and
proportions, that had met with an accident. He is a shore
frequenter, especially when young, and I cannot help thinking that
in antediluvian days when mastodons were plentiful and went wading
they stepped on the flounders. A flounder is shaped just as if he
had been run over by an Atlantic avenue truck. His eyes moved over
onto one side of his head, fleeing hand in hand to escape the
wheel. His mouth was mashed fairly and seems to be perpetually
ejaculating "Help, murder!" and one side of him is still white as
snow with the fear of the affair. He ought to be in a cripples'
home, but he is not. Instead he is as jolly as a sand man and
amply able to take care of his wreck of a body, which is flat
indeed but fat. Necessity is the mother of invention. When the
flounder sees food that he wants he falls upon it and holds it
down with ease while he devours it. A slender fish would have no
such chance.

At this time of year come roving northward from unknown feeding
grounds outside the Cape the haddock. There are people who call
the haddock "scoodled skull-joe," probably in derision because he
is such a dapper fish. He is so silvery and neat that the black
stripe down his side seems to give him the effect of being clad in
the very latest thing in summer trousers. The Banks fishermen who
sail from Gloucester and are probably more intimately acquainted
with the personal affairs of fishes than anyone else,