houses, and beyond them a two-story dwelling, of dark and weather-
beaten aspect, the whole intermixed with one or two snug cottages,
painted white, a sufficiency of pigsties, and a shoemaker's shop. Two
grocery-stores stand opposite each other, in the centre of the
village. These were the places of resort, at their idle hours, of a
hardy throng of fishermen, in red baize shirts, oilcloth trousers, and
boots of brown leather covering the whole leg; true seven-league
boots, but fitter to wade the ocean than walk the earth. The wearers
seemed amphibious, as if they did but creep out of salt water to sun
themselves; nor would it have been wonderful to see their lower limbs
covered with clusters of little shellfish, such as cling to rocks and
old ship-timber over which the tide ebbs and flows. When their fleet
of boats was weather-bound, the butchers raised their price, and the
spit was busier than the frying-pan; for this was a place of fish, and
known as such, to all the country round about; the very air was fishy,
being perfumed with dead sculpins, hardheads, and dogfish, strewn
plentifully on the beach. You see, children, the village is but
little changed, since your mother and I were young.

How like a dream it was, when I bent over a pool of water, one
pleasant morning, and saw that the ocean had dashed its spray over me
and made me a fisherman! There were the tarpauling, the baize shirt,
the oil-cloth trousers and seven-league boots, and there my own
features, but so reddened with sunburn and sea-breezes, that methought
I had another face, and on other shoulders too. The sea-gulls and the
loons, and I, had now all one trade; we skimmed the crested waves and
sought our prey beneath them, the man with as keen enjoyment as the
birds. Always, when the east grew purple, I launched my dory, my
little flat-bottomed skiff, and rowed cross-handed to Point Ledge, the
Middle Ledge, or, perhaps, beyond Egg Rock; often, too, did I anchor