off Dread Ledge, a spot of peril to ships unpiloted; and sometimes
spread an adventurous sail and tracked across the bay to South Shore,
casting my lines in sight of Scituate. Ere nightfall, I hauled my
skiff high and dry on the beach, laden with red rock-cod, or the
whitebellied ones of deep water; haddock, bearing the black marks of
St. Peter's fingers near the gills; the longbearded hake, whose liver
holds oil enough for a midnight lamp; and now and then a mighty
halibut, with a back broad as my boat. In the autumn, I trolled and
caught those lovely fish, the mackerel. When the wind was high,--when
the whale-boats, anchored off the Point, nodded their slender masts at
each other, and the dories pitched and tossed in the surf,--when
Nahant Beach was thundering three miles off, and the spray broke a
hundred feet in air, round the distant base of Egg Rock,--when the
brimful and boisterous sea threatened to tumble over the street of our
village,--then I made a holiday on shore.

Many such a day did I sit snugly in Mr. Bartlett's store, attentive to
the yarns of Uncle Parker; uncle to the whole village, by right of
seniority, but of Southern blood, with no kindred in New England. His
figure is before me now, enthroned upon a mackerel-barrel; a lean old
man, of great height, but bent with years, and twisted into an uncouth
shape by seven broken limbs; furrowed also, and weather-worn, as if
every gale, for the better part of a century, had caught him somewhere
on the sea. He looked like a harbinger of tempest, a shipmate of the
Flying Dutchman. After innumerable voyages aboard men-of-war and
merchant-men, fishing-schooners and chebacco-boats, the old salt had
become master of a handcart, which he daily trundled about the
vicinity, and sometimes blew his fish-horn through the streets of
Salem. One of Uncle Parker's eyes had been blown out with gunpowder,
and the other did but glimmer in its socket. Turning it upward as he