rises, the masts which have been lying over on one side in a sleepy
stillness begin to stir, then to sway, until with each new impulse of
the sea all the boats are dancing, and soon the whole harbour is awake
and merry as if every mast were a steeple with a peal of bells. It is
not long till the fishermen arrive. One meets them in every cobbled
lane. How magnificent the noise made by a man in sea-boots on the
stones! Surely, he strikes sparks from the road. He thumps the ground
as with a hammer. The earth rings. One has seen those boots in the
morning hanging outside the door of his house while he slept. They
have been oiled, and left there to dry. They have kept the shape of
his limb and the crook of his knee in an uncanny way. They look as
though he had taken off his legs before going into the house and hung
them on the wall. But the fisherman is a hero not only in his boots.
His sea-coat is no less magnificent. This may be of oil-skin yellow or
of maroon or of stained white or of blue, with a blue jersey showing
under it, and, perhaps, a red woollen muffler or a scarf with green
spots on a red ground round his throat. He has not learned to be timid
of colour. Even out of the mouths of his boots you may see the ends of
red knitted leggings protruding. His yellow or black sou'-wester
roofing the back of his neck, he comes down to harbour, as splendid as
a figure at a fair. And always, when he arrives, he is smoking a pipe.
As one watches him, one wonders if anybody except a fisherman, as he
looks out over the harbour, knows how to smoke. He has made tobacco
part of himself, like breathing.

If the tide is already full the fishermen are taken off in small
rowing-boats, most of them standing, and the place is busy with a
criss-cross of travelling crews till the fishing-boats are all manned.
If the water is not yet deep, however, most of the men walk to their
boats, lumbering through the waves, and occasionally jumping like a