and to soften over-rugged outlines, like | lying at anchor, and touched from island the great camel humps of Mount Desert, instead of a lowering gloom; and inasmuch as it so happened that he had been chilled and dejected by unceasing fogs and rains among the vine-clad hills of France, and all the rest of it, not long before, he abandoned from this time his sympathy for the early explorers. Sailing in upon such lovely vistas in their favorable mood, they could have had little reason for dis

Vol. LXI.-No. 363.-22

to island, in front of white summer hotels and bowling-alleys, by which excursionists in sailor suits were playing croquet. The government had a collection of bulky red buoys ranged on Little Hog Island, with an odd effect; Little Chebeague had one of the most attractive of the white hotels; Great Chebeague, a white church; Hope Island, a single poor house and barn, with a patch of cabbages

accordingly was.

He was rowed thither, | other varieties. It was drained a couple of days, and thereupon transported to the flakes. It lay there, back upward first, then the meat side, till the sun had dried out of it all its moisture, and it was no longer a fish, but the mummy of a fish, endowed by salt and desiccation with something very like immortality. The sun must not be allowed to strike down too fiercely, to avoid which the flakes were made capable of being sloped at an angle. Sedulous attendants generally hovered near them for this service, and to spread out the fish in the morning, gather them up into hillocks on the approach of fog or storm, and at evening, and to cover them with gambrel-roof-shaped wooden boxes for protection.

across the swift deep channel from Harpswell, in the kind of small boat universally in use, sharp at both ends and flat on the bottom, known as a dory. No sooner was he landed than he discovered a potential "Pearl of Orr's Island," and Moses as well, under the bashful hats of brown little children going "berrying" along the single, central road. He saw the distant white spire of Parson Sewell's meetinghouse, to which the characters used to sail of a Sunday, on Harpswell, over the top of a couple of the most delightful old hulks in a cove. And the lively Sally Kittredge, he figured, was the young woman at whose house he dined at noonthere being no hotels-who had been at a seminary on the mainland, and who wove wonderful mats for the floors out of no other material than common rags. Some of these were of naïve, charming designs, like patterns of tea-cups, red and blue flowers and irregular leaves scattered over a drab ground, and he thought the household art companies of the time might be glad to know of them. The mats were a usual domestic product, and he began to suspect that he had happened on a true vein of original artistic inspiration in this remote corner of American territory. But it appeared that the naïve and old-tapestry-looking ones were the result of errors, and received contemptuous treatment in consequence, as too horrid for anything, while the ideal actually aspired to was of a very different and insipid character.

At the hither point of the island, which had a length of about three and a half miles, were a flourishing store, fish-houses, and a wharf. The hill-side was set with the lattice-work "flakes," or tables for drying the fish, thenceforward a pretty constant spectacle. The Maine islander has them about his house as a farmer elsewhere might have rows of bee-hives, or milk-pans, or a vineyard. Middleton had passed his days with but a shadowy idea of how the plump and dripping and animated fish of the ocean is converted into the arid product of the corner grocery, and now it was with a becoming sense of improvement that he observed the process.

The freshly captured victim was decapitated, split down the back, cleansed, and thrown into a pickle of Cadiz salt, to lie from spring to autumn if it were a large cod, a week or ten days for most of the

"What fish have you there?" inquired Middleton, early in these scenes, of an attendant, who proved to be a buyer and dealer as well.

"Cod, haddock, and pollock mostlyand hake."

"It appears that the rule is indeed of universal application," he said, in a musing way, having, we may suppose, very little on his mind. "The fisherman, too, must make hake while the sun—” But fancying that the man's eye glared with a stern reprobation at him, he turned it off, and complimented him on his fish, and inquired the prices.

"They're good 'uns, and plenty on 'em,' said the dealer, idly tossing a misplaced haddock down the flakes; "but they hain't wuth nothin'-'bout a dollar a kental for hake. I can't get no more; mebbe there's them that can. Yours was hake, was it?" he concluded, with the bargainer's half closing of the eyes.

All these varieties had their plainly distinctive marks and peculiar customs, and as Middleton came to know them better, he took the more friendly interest in their fortunes. The hake is of a white slimy surface. He must be taken in deep water-seventy fathoms is not too much— and over mud, not rock, bottom. The pollock is known by his white stripes, to which the haddock has dark stripes corresponding. He prefers rather shoal water, but a considerable distance from shore, and is the "gamest" of all, making an energetic resistance to capture, both by force and subterfuge. The haddock has in addition two "devil marks," the prints of a thumb and finger authentically known to have been left by the arch-enemy in lift

saw them at twilight with a pensive effect, notably off such places as Seguin or the Half-way Rock. There were usually two men, or a man and a boy, in a small boat with the mast taken down, who attended two lines each. Once he heard a haker's boy berated because he had slumbered and slept instead of watching, and the fish had eaten off not only his bait, but one of his lines.

ing the ancestor of the race out of water on one occasion. The haddock has the repute of being the best chowder fish. He frequents shoal grounds, and remains on the coast all winter, while the hake makes off into deeper water, and the pollock, it is thought, to the southward. Large cod was accounted the choicest of the fish for curing. It is taken at its best on the dangerous bank of George's. The meat there is whiter, owing to the clear sandy bottom, while the rock fish of inshore has a red-ble character of the dogfish. His looks der tinge, following the general law that fish approximate the color of the bottom over which they feed.

It appeared that while the man who went out for pollock was said to have gone "pollocking," and the one who went for haddock "haddocking," without distinct appellations for their branches of business, the man who fished for hake, and also his boat, was a "haker." In other departments there were, in the same way, trawlers, draggers, riggers, seiners (popularly called seeners), and the bankers before mentioned. In the month of August the hake was only to be caught at night, being frightened off in the daytime by the unusual voracity of the dogfish. Middleton met the hakers returning at sunrise, wearied with the long night's vigil which fell to their lot at this time, and

Everywhere there was the most execra

have nothing to say in his favor. This pest of the whole coast is perhaps two feet long, with a weight of three to five pounds, a rough, leathery skin, no scales, a long, pointed snout, and mouth underneath like a shark's, so that he turns upon his back to bite. It is not simply that he chases other species-for all the finny tribes have their animosities and victims-but he is omnipresent, his skin excoriates the hands if it be touched, he finds means to drive deep in and draw blood with a cruel thorn which is said to be poisonous, and he is good for nothing himself. Such, at least, is the contemporaneous estimate of his value; "but those eccentric ancestors of ours," said Middleton, "must take it upon themselves to think otherwise. It is not strange they should have differed from us in their ideas of religion, government, and

of sharks as that of these same dogfish again. He was told a startling episode of two men who had gone down to Matinic Rock-a satellite of Matinicus-in the autumn for the popular diversion among the islanders of shooting wild fowl. Shortly

political economy when we find them having such unaccountable stomachs as this;" and he quoted to incredulous ears around him an early voyager who set down in his journal that with sassafras he had cured a surfeit of one of his men, which was brought on by "eating the bellies of dog-after they landed, their dory went adrift, fish, a very delicious meat."

The clear bottom about the fish-house and wharf, wherever he went, was paved with heads and small waste portions of the others, to be sluiced out by the tides; but the dogfish lay there at full length,

and they saw it a short distance off.
"Stay," said one of them, throwing
down his gun; "I will swim out and
bring it back." He had gone but twenty
feet from the shore when he was seen to
struggle violently, and throw up his hands

with an ugly foiled-desperado air in death; and he felt his foot, as it were, above an arrant bully and rascal, as he looked down, and pronounced a mental sic semper tyrannis over him. The water on those coasts was excessively cold, so that it was rare that even the veteran fishermen could swim.

One day, in a cruise in a specially chartered jigger, well out to sea toward Mount Desert Rock, though he knew the temperature of the water well, he would have jumped overboard for the refreshment of a hasty dip in it, but he was deterred, not so much by the usual bugbear

with a wild despairing cry: "My God!" he said, "the dogfish! Shoot me, and don't let me suffer."

But they devoured him piecemeal, as the story went, and his companion could only look on in helpless horror at his fate."

So impressed was Middleton by this that he quite forgot to inquire into the fate of the survivor, left himself in a situation of no small interest, and re-adjusting his blue flannel yachting shirt, sat down with more contentment to the business of hand-lining for deep-water fish.