nd are caught by the gills. There may not be a score in a whole fleet
of nets, or they may come up like a glittering mat, beyond the strength
of two men to lift over the gunwale. Twenty-five thousand herring is
about the burthen of an open beach drifter. Are there more, nets must
be given away at sea, or buoyed up and left--or cut, broken, lost.
Small catches are picked out of the nets as they are hauled in, large
catches ashore.

[Sidenote: _FISHERMEN FLEECED_]

It is ashore that the fisherman comes off worst of all. Neither
educated nor commercialized, he is fleeced by the buyers. And if he
himself dispatches his haul to London.... Dick Yeo once went up to
Billingsgate and saw his own fish sold for about ten pounds. On his
return to Seacombe, he received three pounds odd, and a letter from the
salesman to say that there had been a sudden glut in the market.
Fishermen boat-owners have an independence of character which makes it
difficult for them to combine together effectively, as wage-servers do.
They act too faithfully on the adage that a bird in the hand is worth
two in the bush, and ten shillings on the beach a sovereign at
Billingsgate. So 'tis, when

There's little to earn and many to keep,

and no floating capital at a man's disposal.

In recent years, owing to bad prices and seasons and general lack of
encouragement, or even of fair opportunity, the number of sea-going
drifters at Seacombe has decreased by two-thirds. Much the same has
happened at other small fishing places along the coast. This
decline--so complacently acquiesced in by the powers that be--is of
national importance; for the little fisheries are the breeding ground
of the Navy. Nowadays fishermen put their sons to work on land.
"'Tain't wuth it," they say, "haulin' yer guts out night an' day, an'
gettin' no forrarder at the end o'it." Luckily for England the sea's
grip is a firm one, and many of the sons return to it.

When one hears Luscombe talk about the maddening trouble he has had in
teaching plough-tail or urban recruits to knot and splice a rope, or
watches, as I have, a couple of blue-jackets drive ashore in a small
boat because they couldn't hoist sail, then one comprehends better the
importance of the fisher-families whose work is made up of endurance,
exposure, nerve and skill; who play touch and go with the sea; and who
in the slack seasons have--unlike the ordinary workman--only too much
time to think for themselves. The