ey resemble gay butterflies, preening their wings for a flight
into the depth.

Here it must have been, and in the middle of all these, that the very
famous Robin Lyth--prophetically treating him, but free as yet of fame
or name, and simply unable to tell himself--shone in the doubt of the
early daylight (as a tidy-sized cod, if forgotten, might have shone)
upon the morning of St. Swithin, A.D. 1782.

The day and the date were remembered long by all the good people of
Flamborough, from the coming of the turn of a long bad luck and a bitter
time of starving. For the weather of the summer had been worse than
usual--which is no little thing to say--and the fish had expressed their
opinion of it by the eloquent silence of absence. Therefore, as the
whole place lives on fish, whether in the fishy or the fiscal form,
goodly apparel was becoming very rare, even upon high Sundays; and
stomachs that might have looked well beneath it, sank into unobtrusive
grief. But it is a long lane that has no turning; and turns are the
essence of one very vital part.

Suddenly over the village had flown the news of a noble arrival of
fish. From the cross-roads, and the public-house, and the licensed
head-quarters of pepper and snuff, and the loop-hole where a sheep had
been known to hang, in times of better trade, but never could dream of
hanging now; also from the window of the man who had had a hundred
heads (superior to his own) shaken at him because he set up for making
breeches in opposition to the women, and showed a few patterns of what
he could do if any man of legs would trade with him--from all these
head-centres of intelligence, and others not so prominent but equally
potent, into the very smallest hole it went (like the thrill in a
troublesome tooth) that here was a chance come of feeding, a chance
at last of feeding. For the man on the cliff, the despairing watchman,
weary of fastening his eyes upon the sea, through constant fog and
drizzle, at length had discovered the well-known flicker, the glassy
flaw, and the hovering of gulls, and had run along Weighing Lane so
fast, to tell his good news in the village, that down he fell and
broke his leg, exactly opposite the tailor's shop. And this was on St.
Swithin's Eve.

There was nothing to be done that night, of course, for mackerel must be
delicately worked; but long before the sun arose, all Flamborough, able
to put leg in front of leg, and some who could not yet do that, gat