peculiar industries connected with the trade
are very considerably exercised. All day long carts come in with the
fish; all day long carts go out with the manufactured articles to the
railway-station; day and night the men and women are at work; in one
quarter the women make and mend the nets, which are then boiled in cutch
and put on board the boats; in another quarter coopers are at work making
boxes and casks and barrels. As to the baskets, the country is ransacked
for them, and as soon as they are filled they take the train and away
they go, to give a flavour to the potato dinner of the poor man, or to
form a tasty adjunct to the dishes under which the breakfast table of his
lord and master groans. In London we get the best--the smaller herrings
go to the North, as the dwellers in those parts will not pay the price
the Londoner does. Great is the joy and rejoicing, as well can be
imagined, at Lowestoft when the herring season comes on. It is true, the
Lowestoft fishers do not have it all to themselves. Yarmouth is a fierce
rival in the race, and, as it has now superior accommodation, many a boat
makes for that far-famed port. Then, the Scotch, when they have done
their fishing, make for the English coast, and manage, as Scotchmen ever
do, to gather a fair share of the spoil. As to the foreigners, they are
not such formidable rivals as sometimes we are apt to believe. The
Frenchman or the Dutchman comes, but that is when he is blown off by a
gale from his own happy hunting-ground, and then we know, all the world
over, the cry is, 'Any port in a storm.'

Oh, these storms! how terrible they are! and how little, as we eat our
Yarmouth bloater of a morning, or spread the bloater-paste as a covering
to the thin slice of bread-and-butter, to tempt the languid appetite--how
little do we who sit at home at ease realize their fury and their power!
As I now write, twenty-one orphans are bewailing the loss of fathers who
went out in a craft during the last gale, and of whom no sign has been
seen, nor ever will. Hour by hour the women, weeping and watching on the
sandy shore, saw one and another familiar boat come, more or less
buffeted, into port. On more than one a hand had been washed away, but
the craft and the rest of the crew were saved somehow. But one boat yet
remained missing, and in vain the survivors were questioned as to what
had become of the _Skimmer of the Sea_. Day by day anxious eyes swept
the dista