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Accordingly, when one of the "commercials" in the coffee-room of the Plymouth Hotel began to tell a wonderful story of a mackerel he once caught a very long time back, I immediately put down my pen so as to listen with all my ears.
I was camping one summer on a little lake Deer Pond, the natives called it a few miles back from a quiet summer resort on the Maine coast. Summer hotels and mackerel fishing and noisy excursions had lost their semblance to a charm; so I made a little tent, hired a canoe, and moved back into the woods. It was better here. The days, were still and long, and the nights full of peace.
They had been walking together along the shore, watching the splendour of the sea sunset that flamed and glowed in the west, where there was a sea of mackerel clouds, crimson and amber tinted, with long, ribbon-like strips of apple-green sky between. They had walked in silence, hand in hand, as children might have done, yet with the stir and throb of a mighty passion seething in their hearts.
Over the water there were white gulls flying, lazy and low; schools of young mackerel displayed their white sides above the surface; and it seemed as if even a butterfly might be seen for miles over that calm expanse. The bay was covered with mackerel-boats, and one man sculled indolently across the foreground a scarlet skiff.
Nearly off Gravelines another States' ship, the Mackerel, came in sight, which forthwith attacked the St: Philip, pouring a broadside into her by which fifty men were killed.
The ladies were in their pokiest old head-gear and most dingy gowns, when they perceived the carriage approaching; and considering, of course, that the visit of the Park people was intended for them, dashed into the rectory to change their clothes, leaving Rowkins, the costermonger, in the very midst of the negotiation about the three mackerel.
The night's catch of mackerel had been good, and the small room with its zinc bar was noisy with fisher-folk wiry fishermen with legs and chests as hard as iron; slim brown fisher girls as hardy as the men, capricious, independent and saucy; a race of blonds for the most part, with the temperament of brunettes.
Smelts smell like cucumbers: the green-bone fish and the mackerel smell alike. Musk itself is produced, as a scent attracting the opposite sex, by several animals musk-deer, musk-sheep, musk-rats. I am not now attempting to enumerate the well-recognised odours of animals such as are extracted from them by man in order to "opsonize" himself, but am pointing to the more obscure cases.
"I've had no fish in this hotel except a mackerel which I caught myself and brought back for my tea, and now I'm asked to pay two shillings for it? Just take the bill back to your mistress and tell her the fish was mine I caught it myself in the Bay yesterday afternoon."
Some of the stalls were very tempting and the smiling, red-cheeked old women, sitting up behind their wares, were so civil and anxious to sell us something. The fish-market was most inviting quantities of flat white turbots, shining silver mackerel, and fresh crevettes piled high on a marble slab with water running over them.
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