as hardly out of the house before Sammy's wife came running after me.

"You's forgot your mitts," she cried. "Here they is. I hung 'em up back
o' th' stove ter dry. It's like ter be cold at sea an' ye'll be wantin'
them."

I thanked the good woman, telling her that I could afford to be careless
since I had her to look after me.

"Oh! Don't be talkin'," she answered, highly pleased.

I stopped for a moment to light my pipe. Mrs. Sammy was now calling upon
her offspring to hasten, for it was a fair drying day. The sun was out
and the ripples glimmered brightly over the cove. The people were
climbing up on their flakes, tall scaffolds built on a foundation of
lender poles, and were spreading out the split, flattened codfish, that
would have to dry many days before it would be fit to trade or sell.
Everywhere in the settlement women and children, and a few old men unfit
for harder labor, were engaged in the same back-breaking occupation. The
spreading out always seems easy enough, for they deal out the fishy slabs
as cards are thrown upon a table, but the picking and turning are arduous
for ancient spines stiffened by years of toil.

I also looked out upon the cove, where a few men in dories were engaged
in jigging for squid, pulling in the wriggling things which had been
attracted by a piece of red rag, their tentacles caught upon the upturned
needles of the jig. They were dropped with a sharp, jerky motion on the
slimy mass of their fellows, all blotched with the inky discharge. Out
beyond the rocky headlands, in the open sea, the little two-masted smacks
were hurrying to anchor or already bobbing up and down with furled
canvas, rising, falling and yawing to the pull of the sea. At times, by
looking sharply, one could catch the gleam of a fish being pulled in, and
sometimes one could hear the muffled thump of the muckle, when the fish
was a big one.

The air was good indeed to breathe. The dull griminess of the village, so
utterly dismal in the rain and fog of yesterday, had given place to
something akin to cheerfulness. On the tops of the cliffs the scanty
herbage, closely cropped by the goats, was very green, of the deep
beautiful hue one only finds in lands drenched by frequent downpours. The
sea was restless with long gentle swells which now only broke when they
reached the bottoms of the rocks which they pounded, intermittently, with
great puffs of white spray.

The goats were briskly clambering among the boul