en pasture. The
village was picturesque in the variety of its edifices, though all
were rude. Here stood a little old hovel, built, perhaps, of
driftwood, there a row of boat-houses, and beyond them a two-story
dwelling of dark and weatherbeaten aspect, the whole intermixed with
one or two snug cottages painted white, a sufficiency of pig-styes and
a shoemaker's shop. Two grocery stores stood opposite each other in
the centre of the village. These were the places of resort at their
idle hours of a hardy throng of fishermen in red baize shirts,
oilcloth trousers and boots of brown leather covering the whole
leg--true seven-league boots, but fitter to wade the ocean than walk
the earth. The wearers seemed amphibious, as if they did but creep out
of salt water to sun themselves; nor would it have been wonderful to
see their lower limbs covered with clusters of little shellfish such
as cling to rocks and old ship-timber over which the tide ebbs and
flows. When their fleet of boats was weather-bound, the butchers
raised their price, and the spit was busier than the frying-pan; for
this was a place of fish, and known as such to all the country round
about. The very air was fishy, being perfumed with dead sculpins,
hard-heads and dogfish 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 fisherman! 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 St. Peter's fing