ience and singers.

[Abundance of codfish] At Webeck Harbor, which we came to pronounce
"Wayback," probably because it seemed such a long way back to anything
worthy of human interest, we saw the business of catching cod at its
best. They had just "struck a spurt," the fishermen said, and day
after day simply went to their traps, filled their boats and bags,
took the catch home, where the boys and "ship girls" took charge of
it, and returned to the traps to repeat the process. An idea of the
amount of fish taken may be given by the figures of the catch of five
men from one schooner, who took one thousand quintals of codfish in
thirteen days. We obtained a better idea of the vast catch by the
experience of one of our parties who spent part of a day at the traps,
as the arrangement of nets along the shore is called, into which the
cod swim and out of which they are too foolish to go. They are on much
the same plan as salmon weirs, only larger, opening both ways, and
being placed usually in over ten fathoms of water and kept in place by
anchors, shore lines, and floats and sinkers. Once down they are
usually kept in place a whole season. The party were in a boat, inside
the line of floats, so interested in watching the fishermen making the
"haul," as the process of overhauling the net and passing it under the
boat is called, by which the fish are crowded up into one corner where
they can be scooped out by the dozen, that they did not notice that
the enormous catch was being brought to the surface directly under
them till their own boat began to rise out of the water, actually
being grounded on the immense shoal of codfish.

It was a strange sensation and makes a strange story. All the time
that we were storm-stayed at Webeck the "spurt" continued, and the
trap owners were tired but jubilant. The "hand-lining" crews were
correspondingly depressed, for, though so plenty, not a cod would bite
a hook. It is this reason, that is, because an abundance of food
brings the cod to the shores in great numbers and at the same time
prevents them from being hungry, that led to the abandonment of
trawling and the universal adoption of the trap method. We did not see
a single trawl on the coast, and it is doubtful if there was one there
in use.

During these spurts, the day's work just begins, in fact, after the
hard labor of rowing the heavy boats out, perhaps two miles, to the
trap, hauling, mending the net, loading and unloading the