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"I even chucked the fellow's seamanship in his teeth!" Sir William polished his eyeglass with a silk handkerchief and replaced it with care. "Did you!" he said. A squat tub of a boat, her stern piled high with wicker crab-pots, came round the northern headland and entered the little bay. The elderly fisherman who was rowing rested on his oars and sat contemplating the crab-pots in the stem.
He knew it for a floor through which he let down his trammels and crab-pots into wonderland a twilight with forests and meadows of its own, in which all the marvels of all the fairy-books were possible; but the terror of it had never clouded his delight. "Nonsense, Billy; the voice I hear is always quite cheerful and friendly not a bit like a dead man's."
As he walked down the hill by Deacon Snowden's side, she was perfectly conscious of the longing in her heart, but prepared to put a stop to it, and go home to dinner as soon as he had turned the corner and passed out of sight. Then came that unhappy remark about the crab-pots. She bit her lip for a moment, turned, and walked slowly off towards the ferry, full of thought.
"Well, of all the impudence," cried Aleck, "when my uncle bought the whole of the Den estate right down to the sea! Don't you know that you're intruders and trespassers when you come laying your crab-pots under our cliff and shooting your seine on the sandy patch off the little harbour?"
'Well, Ethel, at last he said. 'I never guessed it! she said, with a gasp. 'No wonder Harry cannot bear to be away from it. Must we leave it? as he moved back. 'Only to smooth ground, said Dr. Spencer; 'it is too dark to stay here among the stones and crab-pots.
"Her father's a shipbuilder," urged Sue Tregraine's supporter. "He might so well keep crab pots, for all the chance she'll have." Now there was a Ruan girl standing just outside this group, and she heard what was said. Her name was Nance Trewartha and her father was a fisherman, who did in fact keep crab-pots. Moreover, she was his only child, and helped him at his trade.
At the moment of writing I have never heard of Home Rule, nor do I care two straws whether the House of Lords is to be blown up on the fifth of November. What moves my interest, what stirs my soul, what arouses the politician that lurks in the best of us, is this question of the crab-pots.
But do not confuse the mind of the country on the question of crab-pots. We do not get the Brixham papers here, but friends in London tell us that is what they say. It is the same with the crabs we have to order them from London.
Its inhabitants blue-jerseyed males and sun-bonneted females sit comfortably on their pensions and tempt no perils of the deep. Why should they risk shortening such lives as theirs? A few crab-pots 'accessories, as a painter would say rest on the beach above high-water mark, the summer through; a few tanned nets hang, and have hung for years, a-drying against the wall of the school-house.
These took the matter in a very different light, and thought it quite a pity and a piece of fickle-mindedness, that they might go the round of crab-pots, or of inshore lug-lines, without anybody to watch them off, or come down with a basket to meet them. For be it understood that the great fishing fleet had not launched forth upon its labours.
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