FOR more than three weeks it had been very fine on land, but at sea it was rough and stormy, and the water was churned up and thick. For boulter-fishing in the spring the sea must be clear. Because of the bad weather-conditions there was much poverty in Draeth. Between the end of September and the third week in April some of the fishermen had earned barely three pounds. Since Christmas the boats had not once been able to put out to sea. This meant that all through Lent, when the fish fetches record prices, there had not been a single catch.

The poverty of the fisher-folk pressed heavily on the tradespeople too. When children were almost starving they could not refuse to supply the homes with food. Certainly they entered in their credit ledgers the amounts that were due to them from this family or that, but they well knew that in many cases the reckoning was so great that it would take more than a lifetime to pay it off.

As it so often happens at times like these the most deserving found the least relief. The Prynnes, the Tregennises, the Williamses, the Darks and others shunned debt as they would have shunned the plague. Rather than ask for food to be supplied to them on credit they would starve. Day by day the hoard saved up against a rainy day grew less; for you may be prepared to meet a rainy day, but when the rainy day lengthens into a rainy month then you feel the pinch. For many families in Draeth this was the time of fear. The ever-present question was: How much longer was it possible to hold out?

Then suddenly, when things were at their worst, the weather changed. The wind slewed round to another quarter, the turbid waters became clear, and the fisher-folk grew light-hearted, for at last the boats would put out to sea.

It was on the Monday of the last week in April that the fleet made preparations for sailing. Tregennis looked upon it as a lucky omen that on that very morning he had caught a rat on the “Light of Home.” For some days he had known the plaguey thing was there. Down in the cuddy-hole he had found an old coat of his bitten through in the sleeve. Some of the nets, too, had been gnawed in places, and he had had to be busy mending tackle. It is a grave matter when a rat boards a lugger, for there is no knowing how many more may follow. The four men on the “Light of Home” had laid trap after trap, temptingly baited, but without result.

Now this morning Tregennis had at last put an end to the plaguey varmint. As this trouble was overcome it was taken by the men as a sign that further good luck loomed ahead.

Miss Margaret went into the kitchen before breakfast and found Mrs. Tregennis packing the basket of food for Tregennis to take to sea.

“It do look a lot, don’t it, Miss? There isn’t much room on the boat, so you has to get it packed up tight as can be. They did oughter be back on Wednesday morning, but I puts in for a bit longer than that in case.”

“If you find your store of food running short, Tregennis,” advised Miss Margaret, “remember that you ought to chew a great number of times, forty-five chews to each bit of food I think it is, and then the supplies will last all the longer.”

“My dear life, Miss; ’e do just bolt his food.”

“Can’t seem to taste it, somehow, if I do keep it in my mouth,” Tregennis explained.

“He do eat his food too fast, Miss; I never knoo anyone eat so fast as ’e; I be always a-tellin’ ’e.”

“Well, he must practise this morning. Are you going to give him ham for breakfast, Mrs. Tregennis?”

“’Am?—no, miss—I’ll ’am ’en. He haven’t been to sea and caught no fish. If he don’t work neither shall he eat. That’s in the Bible, isn’t it, Miss?”

“Something like it,” agreed Miss Margaret.

“Yes, ’tis there, for sure. If a man will not work neither shall he eat. It don’t say nothin’ about a woman in like case.”

“Oh, well,” interrupted Tregennis, smiling good-humouredly. “Will not work; but I will work when there’s work to be done—the pity is so often we can’t.”

“You’re both evading this question of chewing,” Miss Margaret complained. “It’s all the fashion now to chew. They say that if you follow this plan you only need half the usual amount of food. You see it all nourishes you then; otherwise half is wasted.”

“Sakes! Tom, you remember that!” admonished Mrs. Tregennis. “’An you too, Tommy, my man. Come here an’ listen to your Mammy. If there’s goin’ to be any savin’ in it every bite as you puts into your mouth you chews on forty-five times—— If so be as you can count so far,” she added, as an afterthought.

“One—two—three—four—five—six—seven,” began Tommy, in a dreary, sing-song voice, with incatchings of the breath.

“That’ll do,” interposed Miss Margaret, hastily. “I am quite sure, Tommy Tregennis, that you can count up to forty-five very nicely indeed,” and, laughing, she went upstairs.

After breakfast the ladies came down to see the boats leave the harbour with the tide.

“’Taint no good, Miss, after all,” Mrs. Tregennis called out gloomily as they passed the kitchen door.

“Oh, Mrs. Tregennis, why? I’m so sorry! Has the wind changed again?”

“Oh, not the fishin’, Miss, but the chewin’,” she hastened to explain. “Tom and Tommy was both tryin’ hard but by the time they’d chewed less an’ twenty chews they didn’t ’ave nothin’ left.”

“We was just chewin’ on nothin’,” added Tregennis, who was drying his face on the runnerin’ towel.

“T’ad all slippen down,” volunteered Tommy, looking up from lacing his boots.

Miss Margaret looked at them sorrowfully. “There, you see,” she declaimed, “it is just the universal finding. You will not allow yourselves to be improved! You do not wish to be nourished! You will not chew! Thus you waste half, nay, more than half, of the food you eat.”

Then, relapsing into her normal manner, “Perhaps I’m not quite justified in speaking,” she admitted, “for I know quite definitely I couldn’t chew forty-five times myself, and I haven’t been as enterprising as you, for I’ve never even tried.”

Tregennis picked up the basket of food that had led to the discussion, and Tommy and the ladies accompanied him to the quay where he boarded the “Light of Home.”

Sitting in the sunshine on the rocks, Tommy’s Ladies watched the fishing boats tack across to Polderry then veer slowly round and sail in a south-westerly direction. From Tregennis they knew that the fleet was making for Mevagissey, where they would shoot their nets and hope to get a good catch for baiting the boulters. In those waters they thought that the smaller fish, pollock, pilchards (not fit, at this time of the year, for food), herring and whiting would be plentiful.

To those who do not know, boulter-fishing seems a fairly easy occupation. The boats sail away with something trawling after them on the floor of the sea, and the fish is caught!

Actually it is one of the hardest bits of work a man can do. If the first shoot of the nets is successful the boulter is baited without delay, and the luggers may sail away at once far beyond the Eddystone to the fishing-grounds some fifty miles from Draeth. Often, however, it happens that the nets are shot two, three, or even four times before the men have fish enough to bait the hooks.

The boulter is made up of thick, weighted ropes. As each boulter is fitted with two thousand hooks, and as these hooks are fastened to it with cotton-line about eight or nine feet apart, it follows that the whole boulter is from three to four miles long.

All the two thousand hooks pass four times through the hands of the men on the lugger. First of all they must be baited, and after this they must be shot. To the end of the boulter that is shot first from the boat a cork buoy bearing a flag is fastened. This is called the dan. At the middle of the boulter is a second dan. “This,” as Tregennis had explained to the ladies, “do give a second chanst, for when once ’tis gone overboard you can’t never even say it do belong to ee. Anythin’ may ’appen to ’e, you can’t never tell.”

When the fish is caught on the two thousand deadly hooks these pass for the third time through the fishermen’s hands, for now they must be hauled. Lastly, when the lugger is back in the harbour, they must all be cleared, not cleared of the catch only, but of all the mutilated bits of bait. Then they are thoroughly cleaned, carefully coiled round and put away in readiness for the next time the boats are afloat.

Miss Margaret and Miss Dorothea were discussing the heaviness of the work and the hard lot of the fisher-folk as they watched the luggers sail away round the curve of the coast towards Mevagissey and the bait.

As they spoke a cormorant dived in front of them beneath the water.

“There!” said Miss Dorothea, indignantly. “Just as if it wasn’t enough for these people to have steam-trawlers, and weather and dog-fish in array against them! And now the cormorants are coming in flocks and are eating up all the smaller fish along the coast. It’s an arrant shame!”

It was just one o’clock. The last lugger had rounded the curve. The ladies picked up their books and walked slowly home over the polished rocks and along the firm wide stretch of sand that grew still wider as the tide flowed slowly out.