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ou are a dear to be always thinking about me. I know I am very mean to leave you." "The young lady'll be well took care of, sir," declared Captain Sammy, who had come in to say that the boat was ready. So we went down to the cove where Frenchy, already apprised that such a distinguished passenger was coming, was feverishly scrubbing the craft and soaking the footboards, endeavoring, with scant success, to remove all traces of fish and bait. "It's dreadful, isn't it?" said Miss Jelliffe as we passed by the fishhouses. "I know that when I get back home I shall never eat another fish-cake. And just look at the awful swarms of flies and blue-bottles. And the smell of it all! It is all undoubtedly picturesque, but it is unspeakably smelly." The men were busily working, and girls and boys of all sizes, and one heard the sound of sharp knives ripping the fish, and the whirring of grindstones, and the flopping of offal in the water. These people were clad in ancient oilskins, stiff and evil with blood and slime, but they lifted gruesome hands to their forelocks as Miss Jelliffe went by and she did her best to smile in answer. "Couldn't they be taught to be a little cleaner?" she asked me. "Isn't it awfully unhealthy for them?" "It is rather bad," I admitted, "and they are always cutting their hands and fingers and getting abominably infected sores. They only come to me when they are in a more or less desperate condition. Yet one can hardly blame them for following the ways of their fathers, when you consider the lack of facilities. They can't clean the fish on board their little boats, as the bankers do on the larger schooners, and there is no place in which they can dispose of the refuse save in the waters of the cove. They don't even have any cultivable land where they could spread it to fertilize the ground. It must drift here and there, to go out with the ebb of the tide or be devoured by other fishes, or else it gets cast up on the shingle. The smell is a part of their lives, and I am nearly sure that they are usually quite unconscious of it. Moreover, they are always harassed for time. If the fishing is good the men at work in the fish-houses ought to be out fishing, and the girls should be out upon the flakes. They often work at night till they are ready to drop. And then perhaps comes a spell of rain, days and weeks of it, during which the fish spoils and all their work goes for nothing. Then they have to tr
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