t
inside the large buoy. Then Uncle Jake's directions, more or less
abbreviated, came fast one after another:

_Back outside oar_ (or _Pull inside oar_), to bring the bows round
towards the buoy.

_Pull both oars_, to bring the boat up to the buoy.

_Pull outside oar_, to bring the stern of the boat a nice striking
distance from the line between the buoy and the small corks. (Uncle
Jake strikes under and up with the tiller.)

_Pull both oars_, while he hauls in the loose line.

_Back both_, to stop the boat's way.

_Back outside oar_, to keep the line just clear of the gunwale.

_Stop_, while he hauls very slowly and stealthily at first, lest prawns
and lobsters jump out, then swiftly, raising his arms high above his
head, until the net is aboard.

So, in single and even half strokes, with variations according to
current and wind, for all the sixteen buoys and nets. Whilst Uncle
Jake, on his part, dropped the prawns into a bag which hung from his
neck, flung the wild-crabs amidships, and the lobsters under the stern
seat, and hove out the net again a few yards from where it was at
first--I, on my part, had to spy the next buoy, a mere rocking blot on
the water, to find out how the line lay from it, and then to hold the
boat steady till he was ready with the tiller. After a time, one became
a little mazed, one's head ached with screwing it round to sight the
buoys, and his directions ceased so long as everything was going right.

[Sidenote: _MAKING THE ROUNDS_]

Very wonderful, even exhilarating was the silence and loneliness, the
feeling that ourselves only, of all the world, were in that beautiful
mysterious place. Had I had prayers to say, I should have said them,
sure that some sort of a God was brooding on the waters and suspicious
perhaps, at the back of my mind, that where the black cliffs upreared
themselves, there the devil was.

After we had hauled and shot again the sixteenth net, Uncle Jake
counted one hundred and seventy odd prawns from his bag into the
basket. "Do 'ee see how whitish they be?" he asked. "They'm al'ays like
that in the dirty water after a gale. Lord, what a battering they poor
things must get when it blows on thees yer coast!" He picked over the
lobsters to see if any were saleable, but found only small
ones--cockroaches--that, as he said, "it don't do to let the bogie-man
[fishery inspector] glimpse.--An' I've a-catched," he added, "more than
five shill'orth o' fine lobsters i