ows how each one ought to lie;
he even keeps the seaweed on some of them trimmed to its proper length.
"But 'tain't like 't used to be," he says.

[18] Like a landing net, but shallower and with a shorter handle.

He has almost given up going to sea for fish; some say because he will
not take the trouble; but I think it is because he loves his rocks and
cliffs so well. No one knows how much by night and day he haunts the
wilder stretches of shore, nor how many miles he trudges in a week. But
the gulls know him well, and will scream back to him when he calls. His
laugh has something of the gulls' cry in it. I have heard it remarked
that when his time comes (no sign of it yet) he will be found one
morning dead among his familiar rocks. He is acquainted with death
there. He has borne home on his shoulder by night the body of a woman
who had fallen from the cliffs above; and again a negro that had washed
ashore. With a little self-control one might have carried the woman all
right, but the drowned nigger.... Imagine his face in the darkness--his
eyes! Only a man with greatness in him, or a very callous man, could
have brought such a corpse home, all along under the crumbling cliffs;
and Uncle Jake is certainly not callous.

5

"Let 'em try any o' their tricks on me! They can turn out the likes o'
us all right, I s'pose. But I can tell 'em what I thinks on 'em, here's
luck. Thank God I don't live in no tradesman's house, an' can deal
where I likes. Not that I shouldn't anyway...."

Grannie Pinn's shrill angry voice pierced the kitchen door. The
occasion was a mothers' gossiping; the subject, a kind of boycott that
is practised in Seacombe. On the table there was a jug of ale and stout
and an hospitably torn-open bag of biscuits. Around it sat Grannie
Pinn--bolt upright in the courting chair, with her hands folded--Mrs
Meer and Mam Widger. The feathers in Grannie Pinn's hat shook like a
bush on the cliff-edge. All of them looked as if they felt a vague
responsibility for the right conduct of the world. In short, they
looked political.

[Sidenote: _POOR MAN v. TRADESMAN_]

The poor people here live in small colonies scattered behind the main
street and among the villas, in little blocks of old neglected
property, some of which has been bought up by tradesmen. So much of the
former village spirit still survives, and so many of the tradesmen have
but recently risen from poorer circumstances, that between some of