lobsters, small or
large, from the cutters that sail along the coast to collect them and
take them to England, and they consider a couple of dozen lobsters a
very good day's fishing. They don't get as good a price in the middle
of the summer, however. They are going to stop the lobstering just now
for the autumn mackerel-fishing, which they hope will be as good as
the mackerel-fishing of last spring, which was the best for the past
four years. The open boat, which they own in partnership, is a
strongly built one about twenty-two feet long, with a lug and foresail
of brown canvas and great flat stones for ballast. The whole outfit,
including the lobster-pots, cost them twenty-five pounds. The pots
have been set and baited with gurnet; during the two hours' interval
we are anchored. A curious thing about the craft is the galley. On a
spar which stretches from the bow to about four feet up the mast is
stretched a piece of brown canvas just forward of the mast, on a flat
stone some lumps of turf are burning, and under this canvas is spread
the straw on which my friends sleep. Mike is now washing a prodigious
quantity of potatoes in a large iron pot, "a grate crop of praties
this year, but the salt water plays the divil with the keeping av
them, like that," and he holds up one with a red mark on it in his
gigantic paw. I kept wondering if they were really going to eat all
these potatoes at one meal. They did, however, washed down with milk
from a big tin jug which they passed around. They make their own bread
or griddle-cake, but that was to be taken with their tea for breakfast
or supper. Tim is a teetotaler, and his two partners have a limit of
three pints (of porter) when they are ashore. They always go ashore on
Sundays, when two of them go to Mass, while the other minds the boat
and the lobsters. Three great, simple, almost child-like giants they
are, yet not without a certain natural courtesy--a core of genuine
politeness within a rough rind.

It was great to see how they made that heavy boat move with their
long oars, coming out of the harbour this morning; and yet they hardly
ever eat any meat. Potatoes and milk are their chief diet; fish
sometimes--"an' thin we has to sample the lobsters sometimes; it
wouldn't do not to sample what we are daling in." They cooked one in
honour of their visitor, who never tasted a better. Then they lit the
pipe, which they smoked in turn, and soon it was time to pick up the
pots. Thr