you jibe
your sail to that freshening west wind off Allerton and bowl down
the coast parallel with the long stretch of Nantasket sands. Again
at the spindle on Harding's Ledge you may catch cunners; perhaps a
stray cod. A cod! There you speak a magic word to the fisherman
from the tide flats far inland. There is the golden fleece for
which the Argonauts of the land-locked harbor set their prows to
the eastward in the starlight. A pull on the sheet and it is
full-and-by to the southeast, with Minot's Light looming gray dead
ahead in the gray wash of breakers. Black-headed gulls swing
across your wake, and in their laughter rings a wild note of sea
freedom. Thus the Vikings laughed as their boats wan to seaward
outside the black cliffs.

*****

The cod is the solid citizen of the sea. In some localities they
call him the ground keeper, and he seems to be that--a sort of
land owner of the sea bottom. Just as ashore most substantial
success comes from land-holding, and those who own the earth are
almost invariably financial magnates also, so the cod is a banker.
Some people, not financial magnates themselves in all probability,
have given this substantial dweller of the under-water plateaus
undignified names. They call him pilker, scrod, groper, etc. This
is pure envy. When he bites it means business. There is none of
the bait-stealing tomfoolery of the cunner, none of the dancing
hilarity of the pollock. It is just a steady down tug that makes
the line cut your fingers and likely takes your hand under water.
If he is a good one you will need to sit back and snub the line
over the gunwale in that first plunge which follows the stab of
the hook. Then it is a steady, muscle-grinding pull to get him up.
It is a stogy, heavy resistance which he offers. To lift him out
of his depths is a good deal like explaining to a middle-class
Englishman something that he does not wish to comprehend, but by
and by, leaning perilously over the rail, you see his tawny bulk
coming up through a well of chrysophrase lined with the
scintillant gold of the imprisoned sun. A lift and a swing, and he
is aboard. He may weigh anything from a few pounds up to a score.
Cod have been caught weighing 150 pounds, but not in Massachusetts
Bay of late years.

A half-mile to the east of Minot's and southward to beyond
Scituate harbor runs an irregular ridge along the sea bottom at a
depth of six to ten fathoms, while to the east and west is deeper
water