scribable air of a land's-end spot. The fine houses in Scituate are
refreshingly free from pretension; the winds that have twisted the trees
into Rackham-like grotesques have blown away falsity and formality.

Scituate life has always been along the shore. It is from the shore that
coot-shooting used to furnish a livelihood to many a Scituate man, and
still lures the huntsmen in the fine fall weather. It is the peculiar
formation of the shore which has developed a small, clinker-built boat,
and made the town famous for day fishing. It is along the shore that the
unique and picturesque mossing industry is still carried on, and along
the shore that the well-known colony of literary folk have settled.

Scituate's history is really a fishing history, for as early as 1633 a
fishing station was established here, and in course of time the North
River, winding twenty miles through green meadows to the sea, was once
the scene of more shipbuilding than any other river in New England.

There is nothing more indicative of the Yankees' shrewd practicality
than the early settlers' instant appreciation of the financial and
economic potentialities of the fishing-trade. The Spaniard sought for
gold in the new country, or contented himself with the fluctuating fur
trade with its demoralizing slack seasons. But the New Englander
promptly applied himself to the mundane pursuit of cod and mackerel.
Everybody fished. As John Smith, in his "Description of New England,"
says: "Young boyes and girles, salvages or any other, be they never such
idlers, may turne, carry, and returne fish without shame or either great
pain: he is very idle that is past twelve years of age and cannot doe so
much: and shee is very old that cannot spin a thread to catch them."

It began when Squanto the Indian showed the amazed colonists how he
could tread the eels out of the mud with his feet and catch them with
his hands. This was convenient, to be sure, but the colonists did not
long content themselves with such primitive methods. They sent to
England for cod hooks and lines; mackerel hooks and lines; herring nets
and seines; shark hooks, bass nets, squid lines, and eel pots; and in a
short time they had established a trade which meant more money than the
gold mines of Guiana or Potosi. The modern financier who makes a fortune
from the invention of a collar button or the sale of countless penny
packages of gum is the lineal descendant of that first thrifty New
En