om; the casualty most dreaded, being the
enclosure of a large fish along with a shoal of pilchards. A "ling," for
instance, if unfortunately imprisoned in the seine, often bursts through
its thin meshes, after luxuriously gorging himself with prey, and is of
course at once followed out of the breach by all the pilchards. Then, not
only is the shoal lost, but the net is seriously damaged, and must be
tediously and expensively repaired. Such an accident as this, however,
very seldom happens; and when it does, the loss occasioned falls on those
best able to bear it, the merchant speculators. The work and wages of the
fishermen go on as usual.

Some idea of the almost incalculable multitude of pilchards caught on
the shores of Cornwall, may be formed from the following _data_. At the
small fishing cove of Trereen, 600 hogsheads were taken in little more
than one week, during August, 1850. Allowing 2,400 fish only to each
hogshead--3,000 would be the highest calculation--we have a result of
1,440,000 pilchards, caught by the inhabitants of one little village
alone, on the Cornish coast, at the commencement of the season's
fishing.

At considerable sea-port towns, where there is an unusually large supply
of men, boats, and nets, such figures as those quoted above, are far
below the mark. At St. Ives, for example, 1,000 hogsheads were taken in
the first three seine nets cast into the water. The number of hogsheads
exported annually, averages 22,000. In 1850, 27,000 were secured for the
foreign markets. Incredible as these numbers may appear to some readers,
they may nevertheless be relied on; for they are derived from
trustworthy sources--partly from local returns furnished to me; partly
from the very men who filled the baskets from the boat-side, and who
afterwards verified their calculations by frequent visits to the
salting-houses.

Such is the pilchard fishery of Cornwall--a small unit, indeed, in the
vast aggregate of England's internal sources of wealth: but yet neither
unimportant nor uninteresting, if it be regarded as giving active
employment to a hardy and honest race who would starve without it; as
impartially extending the advantages of commerce to one of the remotest
corners of our island; and, more than all, as displaying a wise and
beautiful provision of Nature, by which the rich tribute of the great
deep is most generously lavished on the land most in need of a
compensation for its own sterility.

VI