of it. He is, in short, no fisherman, and his fishing is not a sport, but an occupation. Look at another drawing of the picture. It is half-past four on a July morning, and before the carrion crows have finished scavenging the streets of the straggling seaside town any one who is up and about can tell that it is going to be a day of blazing sunshine. That is why the fishermen down at the quay have all got their boats out early, for they know that with a brazen sun on this clear water the mackerel must be caught before nine or ten, or they will drop down into the deeps, not to be enticed by any kind of bait until moonlight has cooled the surfacewater. All but one of the boats will be out "hand-lining” for mackerel this morning, to return, if their owners are lucky, with ten or twelve dozen fish, which will fetch a penny apiece on lean days, and anything from six-pence a dozen to ten a penny when the bay is full of mackerel and any duffer can catch as many as he pleases. The last boat, however, is not going mackerelfishing. She carries two fishermen, pne of whom is her owner, and the other his son-in-law, formerly a full private in a Line regiment, and a firstrate man in a boat. Both are men of few words, the elder, copper-skinned and with eyes as blue as his blouse, giving short, quiet orders which the younger obeys swiftly and with astonishing strength. Third, the “Victoria Maud" carries a passenger engaged in putting together a short, stiff rod, and fitting a trace of single salmon-gut, eighteen feet of it, to a thin green line wound on seven-inch reel. His quarry is not mackerel, but bass, the handsomest, and, excepting the seatrout, the princeliest fighter of all saltwater fish,-not the heavy twelve or twenty pound bass who in July is cruising round seaweed palaces in deep water, and who does not come to the surface till September, but the shoal bass, weighing anything from one to six pounds. If he is lucky, he will fall in with a shoal perhaps three miles away out to sea, playing over a famous sunken rock that juts up from the sandy sea-floor, as big as a battleship and half as dangerous to ignorant pilots. Meanwhile, during the fifty or sixty minutes which it takes in a light wind to cover the three miles, the hand-lines are let down for mackerel, and at irregular intervals there is a double tug at the line trailing from the stern or boomed out from an oar on the weather side, and a bar of tapered silver, striped and iridescent with green and mauve and apricot, splatters on the clean deck to be sent drumming into darkness under the boarding. But the mackerel lines are soon lifted. The elder fisherman, with one hand on the tiller, has been shading his eyes and staring out over the heaving water ahead. If he were not carrying a passenger he would say nothing. "Can you see the birds, master?” he asks quietly, and suddenly across the wind comes the mingled scream of a thousand gulls. They are swooping and screaming over the sunken rock, chasing the “bait"-the real, glittering whitebait that so seldom comes to table-driven helter-skelter a few inches under the surface by the feeding shoal bass. You can stand up in the bows and watch the fish plunge and dart and dive in the clear sea-water, their wide mouths open and their fins spread, moving like strong, gray ghosts after the scudding bait, and dipping instantaneously three fathoms under the black bows of the oncoming boat. The fishermen have shortened sail, for the wind has freshened, and if the boat ran too fast across these racing tides there would be no keeping the spinner at the end of your salmon-trace under water. Nothing coarser than single gut will catch bass to-day, and even so, a the glittering spinner with its large fish of the day, and of the average triangle hook must swim sixty or sev- weight; if a rare six-pounder strains enty yards behind the boat, so shy are the strength of the gut and the skill the feeding fish. The birds and the of the fisherman almost to breakingbass and the bait are all round the point, there will be two-pounders, and little lugger now: great white herring perhaps smaller, to bring the average gulls introducing their drab, uncouth down. But if the fish are in a taking nestlings to fishing in deep waters a mood, and the wind and water suitmile from the uncleanly rocks where which is by no means the rule in the they screamed welcome to their parents difficult game of bass-fishing-the roda month ago; slim-necked guillemots fisher may with good fortune get into silently diving and swallowing and div. the boat ten or a dozen shining, shapely ing again; red-footed puffins, squatter- bass in a morning's sport,—that is, in ing over the ripples under the bows; the two or three hours when the fish shearwaters skimming with their level, are really feeding. Each fish means a partridge-like flight just clear of the cleverly managed piece of sailing, so waves; and once a flash of black and as to drive through the centre of the white from fifty yards up in the air, a shifting shoal, and each three-pounder heavy plunge into dancing water, and brought into the boat means at least a a great gannet rises on the surface little luck in the fight on the side of the with a mackerel in his beak. The fisherman. boat sails on across the tide, and the That is one meaning of the word screaming birds are now fifty yards "sea-fishing." It can mean other behind her. Suddenly the rod-fisher's things. It can mean swinging at anline, curving out astern, rips the water chor in a racing tide, and measuring like a razor, and the rod-point dips and the strength of finer gut and smaller tugs. His left hand shifts on the butt, hooks than the hand-line fisherman and his right goes to the whirling reel; dare use, against the weight and the it is as much as he dares to check the will of twelve-pound pollock, boring furious pull at the gut seventy yards down into their fastnesses in the green away, for the pace of the boat and the and umber seaweed; or it may mean strength of the tide add enormously to fighting every foot of a line seven the strain on his line. The sail flaps fathom deep, swung down into moonidly as the tiller goes over, and the boat lit water, until the great conger is comes round, allowing him to reel in gaffed in a splatter of salt spray, and half-a-dozen yards of line before his noses pig-like about the floor of the quarry can tug the gut taut again. He boat, an uncomfortable companion for is a gallant fish, and disputes every the row home at midnight. But it is inch of the long path to the side of the the bass-fisher, sailing backwards and boat; and if he weighs but three forwards through the screaming gulls pounds, he has fought in that tumbling and the chasing fish, with the scent of current angrily and bravely, just as his bedstraw and clover and the whistle cousin the perch fights in fresh water. of the curlew coming down wind off He has a dangerous back-fin, too, and the land, and the rod-butt tuggling at when he has had to give in to the re- his fore-arm, who knows the best that lentless pull of gut and silk, he will sea-fishing can mean. The salmonstill wound his enemy with his spines, fisher and the “dry-fly purist" may if he is not swung dexterously between hardly realize that he exists, but he oilskin-clad knees to push the hook knows how much they ought to enry from his wide mouth. He is the first him. Spectator. BOOKS AND AUTHORS. Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton, one of the inost brilliant of contemporary essayists, has written a monograph upon Charles Dickens, the purpose of which is to emphasize the buoyant optimism of Dickens as contrasted with the Laodicean outlook of later writers. Loti, E. V. Lucas and R. Lawrence Donne. In history, the Macmillans promise the completion of Mr. Rhodes's History of the United States and of Herbert Paul's History of Modern England: the fourth volume of the Cambridge Modern History, dealing with the Thirty Years' War; and the first volume of “A History of Rome in the Middle Ages," by F. Marion Crawford and Professor Guiseppe Tomassetti. Among books of an artistic interest promised for publication this fall is a study of Blake-the man, the poet and the artist-by Mr. Laurence Binyon, to be issued in two volumes quarto. The first will contain a complete set of the Illustrations of the Book of Job, reproduced in photogravure in the exact size of the originals; the second, fifty-four plates of The Songs of Innocence and Experience, reproduced in size and color of the originals from the copy lately in the possession of Lord Crewe. Messrs. Longmans and Co. have nearly ready, in two volumes, the “Letters, Personal and Literary, of Robert Earl of Lytton (Owen Meredith)." Lady Betty Balfour is editing this memorial of her father, who had as his friends, and had correspondence with, many notable men in the world of af. fairs and among the foremost representatives of art and literature throughout four decades (1850-90) of last century. It was in 1855, that "Clytemnestra,” which, like nearly all the Earl of Lytton's books, was published under the pseudonym "Owen Meredith," appeared. Biography continues to hold a leading place in contemporary literature. The fall announcements of a single London publishing house, the Me thuens, includes: "From Midshipman to Field-Marshal,” Sir Evelyn Wood's Story of His Life; “Marie Antoinette,” by Hilaire Belloc; "Beauties of the Seventeenth Century," by Allan Fea; “Garrick and his Circle," by Mrs. Clement Parsons; “The Life of Henry Stuart, Cardinal York," by H. M. Vaughan; "Thomas à Kempis, his Age and Book," by J. E. G. de Montmorency; “George Herbert and His Times," by A. G. Hyde; "St. Catherine and Her Times," by Margaret Roberts; "Queen Louisa of Prussia," by Mary M. Moffat; and another life of “Nelson's Lady Hamilton," by E. Hallam Moorhouse. The Cambridge University Press have ready a Bible so printed that both the Authorized and Revised Versions may be read from the same text, without difficulty and without need of ref. erence from text to margin or from one text to a second. The method adopted is to print in large type such words as are common to both Versions. Where there is a difference between the The autumn list of the Macmillans is, as usual, rich in fiction. It includes new novels by Jack London, F. Marion Crawford, Israel Zangwill, Charles Egbert Craddock (Miss Murfee) Pierre a Versions, however minute, the one line in the first issue by the Master of Peof large type divides into two parallel terhouse, writing with the assistance lines of smaller type, of which the up- of the Misses Gaskell, to whom, by per gives the reading of the Revised their permission, he dedicates this ediand the lower that of the Authorized tion of the works of their mother. Version. Thus, by reading along the Each volume will contain a frontislarge type and following, where it piece in photogravure, one being a ceases, the upper of the two small portrait of Mrs. Gaskell by George lines, the Revised Version may be Richmond, R.A., and another an unread; while the large type, in conjunc- published portrait from a drawing by tion with the lower of the small lines, Samuel Laurence, besides other illusgives the continuous text of the Au- trations and facsimile US. The thorized Version. works will be arranged as far as is possible in chronological order, and The Dickensian is happy in having will include several contributions to come into possession of the office-book periodicals hitherto unreprinted, toof Household Words during the period gether with two poems and some unof Charles Dickens's editorship. Every published fragments of stories. thing in the paper, except the serials, appeared anonymously; and the at. An autograph letter of Sir Walter tempts hitherto made to pick out Scott, sold recently at a London aucDickens's own writings have been tion sale, was addressed to Anna largely guesswork. But the office book Seward on receipt of her criticism of tabulated each week the titles of the "Marmion." Praised by Samuel Johnarticles and poems, with the authors' son, and admired as a writer by Manames and the prices paid. The Dick- caulay, Anna Seward, now completely ensian observes that some of the arti- forgotten, corresponded with Scott for cles commonly attributed to Dickens some years before her death in 1809, were not written by him at all. To and then made bim her literary execquote one instance only, on 16 June, utor. The letter of Sir Walter is of 1855, appeared “By Rail to Parnassus." peculiar interest: "It is long since I This is not only attributed to Dickens have been honored with your kind letin Kitton's and other bibliographies, ter containing so favorable and partial but is quoted more than once in Pro- an analysis of ‘Marmion. It is now fessor Ward's volume on Dickens in lying before me, and the contents are the English Men of Letters series as be- enough to warm my blood to the fining autobiographical. As a matter of ger ends, although our coals are all fact, the article was written by Henry expended, the snow lying two feet Morley. deep, and the roads impassable. My for transporting “Marmion" Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. have be- from Lichfield was to make good gun the publication of a new definitive the minstrel prophecy of Constance's edition of the works of Mrs. Gaskell, song. Why I should ever have taken to which is given the title of "The him there I cannot very well say. AtKnutsford Edition.” The edition will tachment to the place its locality with be in eight volumes, these being issued respect to Tamworth, the ancient seat at fortnightly intervals, and there will of the Marmions; partly, perhaps, the be an introduction to each volume, in whim of taking a slap at Lord Brooke addition to a biographical introduction en passant." reason SEVENTH SERIES No. 3246 Sept. 22, 1906. FROM BEGINNING Vol. COL. I. III. IV. CONTENTS. QUARTERLY REVIEW 707 TWENTIETH CENTURY QUARTERLY 724 Wild Wheat. Chapter XXI. The Cottage on the Downs. Chapter XXII. New Year Bells. By M.E. Francis. LONGMAN'S MAGAZINE 731 The Winds of the Ocean. By Frank T. Bullen CORNHILL MAGAZINE 737 The Poetry of America. LONDON TIMES 746 With Wires and Without. By Maurice Solomon. NATURE 752 ter IV. How the Long Night Ended. By Halliwell Sutcliffe. CORNHILL MAGAZINE 755 Puncu 766 V. VI. vii. . VIII. A PAGE OF VERSE IX. The Golden Chain, By Habberton Lulham. OUTLOOK 706 X. To the Artist. By Eden Phillpotts. PALL MALL MAGAZINE 706 BOOKS AND AUTHORS 767 PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY THE LIVING AGE COMPANY, 6 BEACON STREET, BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, THE LIVING Age will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage, to any part of the U. S. or Canada. Postage to foreign countries in U. P. U. is 3 cents per copy or $1.56 per annum. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post office or express money order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. Al: postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, express, and money orders should be made payable to the order of The Living Ace Co. Single copies of The Living Age, 15 cents. |