here are wharfs where blackfaced men with
blue stockings, caps, and gold earrings chatter the patois and smoke
their pipes. In the busy time of year there are ten thousand men in
the town and it is a scene of constant revelry and wildness.

The _Charming Lass_ touched the port at the height of its season--early
September--and, because of the shallowness of the harbor close in,
anchored in the bay amid a crowd of old high-pooped schooners, filled
with noisy, happy Frenchmen. There were other nationalities, too, in
the cosmopolitan bay--Americans setting a new spar or Nova Scotians in
on a good time.

The _Charming Lass_ cast her anchor shortly before six o'clock, having
made the run in five and a half hours with a good breeze behind. Code
and Ellinwood immediately went over the side in the brown dory of the
mate and pulled for the customhouse wharf. The rest of the crew were
forbidden off the decks except to sleep under them, for it was
intended, as soon as the bait was lightered aboard, to make sail to
the Banks again.

The bait industry in St. Pierre is one more or less open to
examination. It is the delight of certain French dealers to go inside
the English three-mile limit, load their vessels with barrels of
herring, and return to St. Pierre. Here they sell them at magnificent
profit to Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Americans. And, as the British
coat of arms is not stamped on herring at birth, no one can prove that
they were not legally procured.

But let a Canadian revenue cutter catch a Frenchman (or American
either, for that matter), dipping herring in any out-of-the-way inlet,
and the owner not only pays a heavy fine, but he often loses his
schooner and his men go to jail for trying to hoist sail and escape at
the last minute.

Code had not reached shore before he had been accosted by fully half a
dozen of these bait pirates. But he passed them, and tying his dory at
the wharf, went on up the street to a legitimate firm.

Immediately the business was finished, Code and Pete Ellinwood started
back to the wharf.

The main street was ablaze with lights. Cafes, saloons, music halls,
catch-penny places--in fact, every device known to separate sailors
from their wages was in operation. The sidewalks were crowded with
men, jabbering madly in the different dialects of their home provinces
(for many come here from France yearly).

"Queer lot, these frog-eaters," said Pete, going into the street so as
to avoid a t