wading girl as a larger wave threatens the tops of their boots. Many
of them carry their supper in a basket or a handkerchief. The first of
the boats begins to move out of its stall. It is tugged into the clear
water, and the fishermen put out long oars and row it laboriously to
the mouth of the harbour and the wind. It is followed by a motor-boat,
and another, and another. There are forty putting up their sails like
one. The harbour moves. One has a sense as of things liberated. It is
as though a flock of birds were being loosed into the air--as though
pigeon after pigeon were being set free out of a basket for home.
Lug-sail after lugsail, brown as the underside of a mushroom, hurries
out among the waves. A green little tub of a steamboat follows with
insolent smoke. The motor-boats hasten out like scenting dogs. Every
sort of craft--motor-boat, gig, lugger and steamboat--makes for sea,
higgledy-piggledy in a long line, an irregular procession of black and
blue and green and white and brown. Here, as in the men's clothes, the
paint-pots have been spilled.

There is nothing more sociable than a fishing-fleet. The boats
overtake each other, like horses in a race. They gallop in rivalry.
But for the most part they keep together, and move like a travelling
town over the sea. As likely as not they will have to come back out of
the storm into the shelter of the bay, and they will ride there till
nightfall, when every boat becomes a lamp and every sail a shadow. In
the darkness they hang like a constellation on the oily water. They
become a company of dancing stars. Every now and then a boat moves off
on a quest of its own. It is as though the firmament were shaken. One
hears the kick-kick-kick of the motor, and a star has become a
will-o'-the-wisp. These lights can no more keep still than a
playground of children. They always make a pattern on the water, but
they never make the same pattern. Sometimes they lengthen themselves