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During the summertime, after we had made something which was successful, I used to engage a brick-sloop at Perth Amboy and take the whole crowd down to the fishing-banks on the Atlantic for two days. On one occasion we got outside Sandy Hook on the banks and anchored. A breeze came up, the sea became rough, and a large number of the men were sick.

But it is among the peculiarities of the seals that, each autumn, they migrate southward, returning each spring in large numbers along the Alaskan coast, and also that, while at the islands, the nursing mothers make long excursions to fishing-banks at distances of from one to two hundred miles.

I ain't got a decent cap to my back: if I was to die to-morrow, I ain't got no cap that's fit to lay me out in. 'Blast ye, says he, 'why didn't ye die when ye had a cap?" The more impassioned side of life does not suit Miss Jewett so well as the humorous and pastoral; but each detail about her heroine is attractive, and nothing in recent fiction, is more true, touching, and womanly than Doris's journey to Westmarket in the autumnal dawn to keep her lover at home from the fishing-banks.

Norman and Breton fishermen continued their yearly trips to the fishing-banks, but during the whole latter half of the sixteenth century no vessel, so far as we know, ever made its way beyond the Saguenay. Some schemes of colonization, without official support, were launched during this interval; but in all such cases the expeditions set forth to warmer lands, to Brazil and to Florida.

Poor fellows, they were bothered with their stomachs and their places to sleep; they quarrelled with the different villagers, and doubtless wished themselves back a hundred times to their fishing-banks and kindred employments, when the Christ moved a little apart from them. It was so with the multitudes before they looked upon His countenance. He paused, but the women did not speak....

In the far-away days, when Neversink was, but the twin beacon-towers that now watch upon its heights were not, when Sandy Hook was a hook only, and not a telegraph-station, from which the first glimpse of an inward-bound argosy is winked by lightning right in at the window of the down-town office where Mercator sits jingling the coins in his trousers' pockets, in those days, the only excursion-boats that rocked upon the ground-swell over the pale, sandy reaches of the Fishing-Banks were the tiny barklets that shot out on calm days from the sweeping coves, with their tawny tarred-and-feathered crews: for of such grotesque result of the decorative art of Lynch doth ever remind me the noble Indian warrior in his plumes and paint.

The incident is worth noting in view of remarks made by a popular fiction-monger in one of his latest works, that indiscriminate aerial raids on civil centres in England are on the same level of humanity as naval bombardments. I visited the fishing-banks off Hasani Island a week or so after to get the latest news of Um-Lejj, which came from Turkish sources.

Perhaps some plundering straggler from the fishing-banks, some manstealer like the Portuguese Cortereal, or some kidnapper of children and ravisher of squaws like themselves, had warned the denizens of the woods to beware of the worshippers of Christ. Their only intercourse was in the way of trade.

Before his expedition of 1534 Jacques Cartier had probably made a voyage to Brazil and had in all probability more than once visited the Newfoundland fishing-banks. Although, when he sailed from St. Malo to become the pathfinder of a new Bourbon imperialism, he was forty-three years of age and in the prime of his days, we know very little of his youth and early manhood.

But I believe I have committed a breach of etiquette in giving precedence to Scuppaug over the skipper, a very large and thoroughly pickled old man, who now bustled deliberately about the decks, with as few clothes on his broad back and stern-post legs as were consistent with decorum and with the requirements of those by-laws of society which extend even to Sandy Hook and the rest of the Jerseys, as well as to the fishing-banks that shoal out from the same.