ers 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 and tossed in the surf, when Nahant Beach was thundering three
miles off and the spray broke a hundred feet in the air round the
distant base of Egg Rock, when the brimful and boisterous sea
threatened to tumble over the street of our village,--then I made a
holiday on shore.

Many such a day did I sit snugly in Mr. Bartlett's store, attentive to
the yarns of Uncle Parker--uncle to the whole village by right of
seniority, but of Southern blood, with no kindred in New England. His
figure is before me now enthroned upon a mackerel-barrel--a lean old
man of great height, but bent with years and twisted into an uncouth
shape by seven broken limbs; furrowed, also, and weatherworn, as if
every gale for the better part of a century had caught him somewhere
on the sea. He looked like a harbinger of tempest--a shipmate of the
Flying Dutchman. After innumerable voyages aboard men-of-war and
merchantmen, fishing-schooners and chebacco-boats, the old salt had
become master of a hand-cart, which he daily trundled about the
vicinity, and sometimes blew his fish-horn through the streets of
Salem. One of Uncle Parker's eyes had been blown out with gunpowder,
and the other did but glimmer in its socket. Turning it upward as he
spoke, it was his delight to tell of cruises against the French and
battles with his own shipmates, when he and an antagonist used to be
seated astride of a sailor's chest, each fastened down by a spike-nail
through his trousers, and there to fight it out. Sometimes he
expatiated on the delicious flavor of the hagden, a greasy and
goose-like fowl which the sailors catch with hook and line on the
Grand Banks. He dwelt with rapture on an interminable winter at the
Isle of Sables, where he had gladdened himself amid polar snows with
the rum and sugar saved from the wreck of a West India schooner. And
wrathfully did he shake his fist as he related how a party of Cape Cod
men had robbed him and his companions of their lawful spoils and
sailed away with every keg of old Jamaica, leaving him not a drop to
drown his sorrow. Villains they were, and of that wicked brotherhood