unspeakably smelly."

The men were busily working, and girls and boys of all sizes, and one
heard the sound of sharp knives ripping the fish, and the whirring of
grindstones, and the flopping of offal in the water. These people were
clad in ancient oilskins, stiff and evil with blood and slime, but they
lifted gruesome hands to their forelocks as Miss Jelliffe went by and she
did her best to smile in answer.

"Couldn't they be taught to be a little cleaner?" she asked me. "Isn't
it awfully unhealthy for them?"

"It is rather bad," I admitted, "and they are always cutting their hands
and fingers and getting abominably infected sores. They only come to me
when they are in a more or less desperate condition. Yet one can hardly
blame them for following the ways of their fathers, when you consider the
lack of facilities. They can't clean the fish on board their little
boats, as the bankers do on the larger schooners, and there is no place
in which they can dispose of the refuse save in the waters of the cove.
They don't even have any cultivable land where they could spread it to
fertilize the ground. It must drift here and there, to go out with the
ebb of the tide or be devoured by other fishes, or else it gets cast up
on the shingle. The smell is a part of their lives, and I am nearly sure
that they are usually quite unconscious of it. Moreover, they are always
harassed for time. If the fishing is good the men at work in the
fish-houses ought to be out fishing, and the girls should be out upon the
flakes. They often work at night till they are ready to drop. And then
perhaps comes a spell of rain, days and weeks of it, during which the
fish spoils and all their work goes for nothing. Then they have to try
again and again, with hunger and debt spurring them on. And the finest