n the world (as Thompson was the greatest
lithotritist), once told me that he had performed over four hundred
operations in the Norwich Hospital for this disease alone.

But FitzGerald's fears concerning Posh were not realised. He seems to
have had an especial dread of the disease (as who has not?), for in a
letter to Frederic Tennyson of January 29th previously (II, 89, Eversley
Edition) he wrote (of Montaigne): "One of his Consolations for _The
Stone_ is that it makes one less unwilling to part with Life."

Levi was a Lowestoft fishmonger, referred to in the footnote of _Two
Suffolk Friends_, p. 108.

The _Gazelle_ was the "punt" or longshore boat which Posh bought at
Southwold, and called (by reason of her splendid qualities) _The Little
Wonder_.

The difference between "sunk" and "swum" herring nets would be
unintelligible to a modern herring fisher. Now the nets are thirty feet
in depth, are buoyed on the surface of the sea, and are kept
perpendicular (like a wall two miles long) by the weight of heavy cables
or "warps" which stretch along the bottom of the nets. I am, of course,
referring to North Sea fishing only, and not to the longshore punts,
whose nets are not half the depth of the North Sea fleets.

In FitzGerald's time if the herring were expected to swim deep the nets
were sunk _below_ the cables or warps which strung them together, and if
they were thought to be swimming high they were buoyed above the warps,
the system of fishing being called "sunk" in the former case and "swum"
in the latter. Now _all_ nets are "swum," that is to say, all are above
the warps and are buoyed on the surface. But the depth has increased so
much (to what is technically known as "twenty-score mesh," which comes to
about thirty feet) that there is no need to alter their setting.

Posh's wife, whose state of health is referred to in this letter,
survived till 1892, but for many years suffered from tuberculosis in the
lungs.

The _Monitor_ was a Kessingland craft, and belonged to one Hutton.

But whether Posh fished with "sunk" or "swum" nets his luck was out for
the season of 1867. The fish as a rule get down to the Norfolk coast
about the beginning of October, and Posh had followed them down from
Scarborough. About the end of September, or the beginning of October,
FitzGerald wrote to his partner, addressing the letter to 8 Strand
Cottages, Lowestoft, in the expectation that the _Meum and Tuum_ had come
south w