ltation of the senses and spirit which the country
boy felt without understanding, and indeed without any formulated
consciousness.

If the camp were near enough to any group of farmhouses to have
visitors, the last afternoon and evening in camp was made a country
frolic. Great sled-loads of girls came out to taste the new sugar, to
drop it into the snow to candy, and to have an evening of fun.

Long ere the full riches of the forests were tested the colonists turned
to another food-supply,--the treasures of the sea.

The early voyagers and colonists came to the coasts of the New World to
find gold and furs. The gold was not found by them nor their children's
children in the land which is now the United States, till over two
centuries had passed from the time of the settlement, and the gold-mines
of California were opened. The furs were at first found and profitably
gathered, but the timid fur-bearing animals were soon exterminated near
the settlements. There was, however, a vast wealth ready for the
colonists on the coast of the New World which was greater than gold,
greater than furs; a wealth ever-obtainable, ever-replenished,
ever-useful, ever-salable; it was _fish_. The sea, the rivers, the
lakes, teemed with fish. Not only was there food for the settlers, but
for the whole world, and all Europe desired fish to eat. The ships of
the early discoverer, Gosnold, in 1602, were "pestered with cod."
Captain John Smith, the acute explorer, famous in history as befriended
by Pocahontas, went to New England, in 1614, to seek for whale, and
instead he fished for cod. He secured sixty thousand in one month; and
he wrote to his countrymen, "Let not the meanness of the word _fish_
distaste you, for it will afford as good gold as the mines of Guiana or
Potosi, with less hazard and charge, and more certainty and facility."
This promise of wealth has proved true a thousandfold. Smith wrote home
to England full accounts of the fisheries, of the proper equipment of a
fishing-vessel, of the methods of fishing, the profits, all in a most
enticing and familiar style. He said in his _Description of New
England_:--

"What pleasure can be more than to recreate themselves before their
owne doores in their owne boates, upon the Sea, where man, woman,
and childe, with a small hooke and line by angling, may take
diverse sorts of excellent fish, at their pleasure? And is it not
pretty sport to pull up twopence, six