ood to tell him.

We had a very typical and enjoyable English Christmas. We over-ate
ourselves, and were well pleased, and the children went to bed crying.

5

[Sidenote: _THE "SHOOTING STAR" FITS OUT_]

"_Shuteing Star o' Seacombe!_ '_Tis_ a purty crew to go herring
driftin'! I'd so soon fall overboard in a gale o' wind as go out to say
wi' thic li'l Roosian like that ther. Lord! did 'ee ever see the like
o'it? I never did. But there, what can 'ee 'spect when the herring be
up in price an' men an' boats as hasn' been to sea for years fits out
for to go herring driftin'? Coo'h! driftin'!"

That was Uncle Jake's opinion. He stood on the shingle with his old
curiosity of a hat cocked on one side and his hands deep in his trouser
pockets, turning himself round inside his clothes to rub warmth into
his skin; talking, always talking, whilst his twinkling eyes watch sea
and land; but ready to help a boat shove off, and willing to take as
pay the opportunity of talking to, and at, its crew. "'Tis blowing a
fresh wind out 'long there, I tell 'ee," was his formula of
encouragement for a starting boat.

Herrings were up! Sixteen shillings a thousand they had been before
Christmas; then eighteen, twenty-three, thirty-one.... "They'm fetching
two poun' a thousand tu Plymouth, what there is, an' buyers there
waiting from all over the kingdom. An' they'm still going up, 'cause
there ain't none. Nine bob a hunderd tu St Ives, I've a-heard say.
There's a Plymouth buyer here to-day. I've a-see'd our Seacombe buyers
luke. They Plymouth men be the bwoys!"

Herrings too have been in our bay as they have not come for
years--'gert bodies of 'em'--while a succession of gales and blizzards
has been sweeping the whole of the rest of the British coasts, and
driving the steam-drifters into harbour. Hence the price of fish:
quotations very high; business nil, or next door to it. Our bay
however, by a fortunate freak of the weather, has been amply calm for
our little undecked drifters, though squalls off land have made sailing
tricky in the extreme. We have seen the snow on the distant hills but
none has fallen here. We have had the ground-swell, rolling in from
outside, but of broken seas, not one.

The boats that came in early on Christmas night (they didn't like the
look of the weather) brought hauls of ten thousand or so. They had
given away netfuls of herring to craft from other places, because they
had caught so many, and the wind