jovial little boys to carry to a waiting donkey cart.

"An' why should I not?" said the old man sternly. "Me--in want--"

As the youth swung his boat swiftly out toward an anchored smack, he
made answer in a softer tone. "Shure, if yez got for th' askin', 'tis
you, Mickey, that would niver be in want." The melancholy old man
returned to his line. And the only moral in this incident is that the
young man is the type that America procures from Ireland, and the old
man is one of the home types, bent, pallid, hungry, disheartened, with a
vision that magnifies with a microscope glance any fly-wing of
misfortune, and heroically and conscientiously invents disasters for the
future. Usually the thing that remains to one of this type is a sympathy
as quick and acute for others as is his pity for himself.

The donkey with his cart-load of gleaming fish, and escorted by the
whooping and laughing boys, galloped along the quay and up a street of
the village until he was turned off at the gravelly strand, at the point
where the colour of the brook was changing. Here twenty people of both
sexes and all ages were preparing the fish for market. The mackerel,
beautiful as fire-etched salvers, first were passed to a long table,
around which worked as many women as could have elbow room. Each one
could clean a fish with two motions of the knife. Then the washers, men
who stood over the troughs filled with running water from the brook,
soused the fish until the outlet became a sinister element that in an
instant changed the brook from a happy thing of gorse and heather of the
hills to an evil stream, sullen and reddened. After being washed, the
fish were carried to a group of girls with knives, who made the cuts
that enabled each fish to flatten out in the manner known of the
breakfast table. And after the girls came the men and boys, who rubbed
each fish thoroughly with great handfuls of coarse salt, which was
whiter than snow, and shone in the daylight from a multitude of gleaming
points, diamond-like. Last came the packers, drilled in the art of
getting neither too few nor too many mackerel into a barrel, sprinkling
constantly prodigal layers of brilliant salt. There were many
intermediate corps of boys and girls carrying fish from point to point,
and sometimes building them in stacks convenient to the hands of the
more important labourers.

A vast tree hung its branches over the place. The leaves made a shadow
that was religious in i