en. _One_ night they can stand, but
_two_ nights' cold and exposure are always fatal. When the fog lifts the
little boat is sometimes quite close to the big one, but the men are
dead--frozen. M. de G. tells us all sorts of terrible experiences that
he has heard from his men, and yet they all like the life--wouldn't lead
any other, and have the greatest contempt for a landsman.

* * * * *
There is a fruit stall at the corner of our street, where we stop every
morning and buy fruit on our way down to the beach. We have become most
intimate with the two women who are there. One, a young one with small
children about the age of ours (to whom she often gives grapes or
cherries when they pass), and the other a little, old, wrinkled,
brown-faced grandmother, who sits all day, in all weathers, under an
awning made of an old sail and helps her daughter. She has very bright
eyes and looks as keen and businesslike as the young woman. She told us
the other day she had _forty_ grandchildren--all the males, men and
boys, sailors and fishermen and "mousses"--many of the girls fishwives
and the mothers married to fishermen or sailors. I asked her why some of
them hadn't tried to do something else--there were so many things people
could do in these days to earn their living without leading such a rough
life. She was quite astonished at my suggestion--replied that they had
lived on the sea all their lives and never thought of doing anything
else. Her own husband had been a fisherman--belonged to one of the
Iceland boats--went three or four times a year regularly--didn't come
back one year--no tidings ever came of ship or crew--it was God's will,
and when his time came he had to go, whether in his bed or on his boat.
And she brought up all her sons to be sailors or fishermen, and when two
were lost at sea, accepted that, too, as part of her lot, only said it
was hard, sometimes, for the poor women when the winter storms came and
the wind was howling and the waves thundering on the beach, and they
thought of their men ("mon homme" she always called her husband when
speaking of him), wet and cold, battling for their lives. I talked to
her often and the words of the old song,

"But men must work and women must weep,
Though storms be sudden, and waters deep,
And the harbour bar be moaning,"

came back to me more than once, for the floating buoy at the end of the
jetty makes a continuous dull melancho