They live by themselves and to themselves, these French fisher-folk; an amphibious race, as completely cut off from the shore-staying population as any caste of Hindustan. The quaint village that they inhabit consists of half a score of steep and narrow lanes, and as many airless courts or alleys, clinging to the cliff as limpets anchor to a rock, and topped by the weather-beaten spire of a church, dedicated of course to St Peter. Hard by there may be a town rich and populous; but its wide streets and display of plate-glass are not envied by the piscatorial clan outside. They have shops of their own, where sails and shawls, ropes and ornaments, high surf-boots and gaudy gown-pieces, jostle one another in picturesque profusion. From the upper windows of the private dwellings project gaffs and booms, whence dangle, for drying purposes, wet suits of dark-blue pilot cloth and dripping pea-coats. Everywhere prevails an ancient and fish-like smell, struggling with the wholesome scent of hot pitch simmering for the manufacture of tarpaulins and waterproofs. Half the houses are draped in nets, some newly tanned to toughen them, others whose long chain of corks is still silvered with herring-scales. The very children are carving boats out of lumps of dark wreck-wood, or holding a mock auction for tiny crabs and spiked sea-urchins. The whole atmosphere of the place has a briny and Neptunian savour about it, and is redolent of the ocean.

A word now as to the fishers themselves; as proud, self-reliant, and independent a race as those hardy Norsemen from whom ethnologists believe them to descend by no fictitious pedigree. Of the purity of their blood there can be little doubt, since the fish-maiden who mates with any but a fisherman is considered to have lost caste; precisely as the gipsy girl who marries a BusnÉ is deemed to be a deserter from the tribe. Marrying among themselves then, it is not surprising that there should be an odd sort of family likeness among them, with one marked type of face and form, or rather two, for the men, curiously enough, are utterly unlike the women. Your French fisher is scarcely ever above the middle height, a compact thick-set little merman, with crisply curling hair, gold rings in his ears, and a brown honest face, the unfailing good-humour of which is enhanced by the gleam of the strong white teeth between the parted lips.

The good looks of the women of this aquatic stock have passed into a proverb; but theirs is no buxom style of peasant comeliness. Half the drawing-rooms of London or Paris might be ransacked before an artist could find as worthy models of aristocratic beauty as that of scores of these young fish-girls, reared in the midst of creels and shrimp-nets and lobster-traps. Their tall slight figures, clear bright complexions, and delicate clean-cut features, not seldom of the Greek mould, contrast with the sun-burnt sturdiness of husband, brother, and betrothed; while the small hands and small feet combine to give to their owners an air of somewhat languid elegance, apparently quite out of keeping with a rough life and the duties of a workaday world.

Work, however—hard and trying work, makes up the staple existence of French fisher-folks, as of French landsmen. In the shrimp-catching season, it must indeed be wild weather which scares the girls who ply this branch of industry, with bare bronzed feet and dexterously wielded net, among the breakers. Others, a few years older, may be seen staggering under weighty baskets of oysters, or assisting at the trimming and sorting the many truck-loads of fish freighted for far-away Paris. The married women have their household cares, never shirked, for no children are better tended than these water-babies, that are destined from the cradle to live by net and line; while the widows—under government authority—board the English steam-packets, and enjoy the sole right of trundling off the portmanteaus of English travellers to their hotel.

The men, the real bread-winners of the community, enter well provided into the field of their hereditary labour. The big Boulogne luggers, strongly manned, and superior in tonnage and number to those which any other French port sends forth, are known throughout the Channel, and beyond it. They need to be large and roomy, since they scorn to be cooped within the contracted limits of the narrow seas, but sail away year after year to bleak Norway and savage Iceland; and their skippers, during the herring-fishery, are as familiar with the Scottish coast as with that of their native Picardy. It is requisite too that they should be strong and fit to 'keep,' in nautical parlance, the sea; for Boulogne, lying just where the Channel broadens out to meet the Atlantic, is exposed to the full force of the resistless south-west gale, that once drove Philip II.'s boasted Armada northward to wreck and ruin.

These south-west gales, with the abrupt changes of weather due to the neighbourhood of the fickle Atlantic, constitute the romance, or compose the stumbling-block of the fisherman's life. His calling may seem an easy and even an enviable one, to those who on summer mornings watch the fishing fleet glide out of harbour; the red-brown sails gilded by the welcome sunshine and filled by the balmy breeze, the nets festooned, the lines on the reel; keg and bait-can and windlass, harmonising well with the groups of seafaring men and lads lounging about on board; too many, as the novice thinks, for the navigation of the craft. But at any moment, with short warning, the blue sea may become leaden-hued, and the sky ragged with torn clouds and veiled with flying scud, and the howling storm may drive the fishers far from home, to beat about as best they may for days and nights, and at length to land and sell their fish (heedfully preserved in ice) at Dunkirk, Ostend, Flushing, or even some English harbour perhaps a hundred and fifty miles away.

The conscription, that relentless leech which claims its tithe of the blood and manhood of all continental nations, in due course takes toll of the fishers. The maritime population, however, supplies the navy, not the army with recruits. It is not until flagship and frigate are manned, that the overplus of unlucky drawers in that state lottery of which the prizes are exemption, get drafted into the ranks. These young sailors find military life a bitter pill to swallow. The writer of these lines has before his eyes a letter from a conscript to his mother in the fishing village, and in which the young defender of his country describes last year's autumn manoeuvres in Touraine, the Little War as he calls it, from a soldier's point of view. There is not a spark of martial ardour or professional pride in this simple document. All the lad knows is that he is marched and countermarched about vast sandy plains from dawn till dark, wet, hungry, and footsore; and how difficult it is at the halting-place to collect an armful of brushwood, by whose cheerful blaze he may warm his stiff fingers and cook his solitary pannikin of soldier's soup.

As might be expected, in a community which more resembles an overgrown family than the mere members of a trade, there exists among these people an unusual amount of charity and rough good-nature. The neighbourly virtues shine brightly amid their darksome lanes and stifling courts, and a helping hand is freely held out to those whom some disaster has crippled in the struggle for existence. Bold and self-assertive as their bearing may be, there are no Jacobins, no partisans of the Red faction among these French fishers. They are pious also in their way, seldom failing to attend en masse at the church of St Nicholas or the cathedral of Notre-Dame, before they set out on a distant cruise.

Once and again in early summer, a fisher's picnic will be organised, when in long carts roofed over with green boughs, Piscator and his female relatives, from the grizzled grandmother to the lisping little maiden, who in her lace-cap and scarlet petticoat looks scarcely larger than a doll, go merrily jolting off to dine beneath the oaks of the forest. In their quiet way, they are fond of pleasure, holding in summer dancing assemblies, where all the merry-making is at an end by half-past nine, and which are as decorous, if less ceremonious, as any ball can be. They are patrons of the theatre too, giving a preference to sentimental dramas, and shedding simple tears over the fictitious sorrows of a stage heroine; while in ecclesiastical processions the brightest patches of colour, artistically arranged, are those which are produced by the red kirtles, the blue or yellow shawls, and the snowy caps of the sailor-maidens.

The gay holiday attire, frequently copied, on the occasion of a fancy dress-ball, by Parisian ladies of the loftiest rank, with all its adjuncts of rich colour and spotless lace; the ear-rings and cross of yellow gold, the silver rings, trim slippers, and coquettish headgear of these French mermaidens; no doubt lends a piquancy to their beauty which might otherwise be lacking. Sometimes an exceptionally lovely fisher-girl may be tempted by a brilliant proposal of marriage, and leaves her clan to become a viscountess, or it may be a marchioness, for mercenary marriages are not universal in France. But such incongruous unions seldom end very happily; for the mermaiden is, alas! entirely uneducated, and proves at best too rough a diamond to appear to advantage in a golden setting.