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Lawrence," said the doctor, as he knocked the ashes from his meerschaum, and refilled it, "known among the fishermen of that river as the LAWYER. I have never seen it among any other of the waters of this country, and never there but once. It never bites at a hook, and is taken only by gill-nets, or the seine.
"And the commercial results, while they don't compare in importance with the saving of life, of course, are even bigger. The winter cod-fishery of New England was absolutely revolutionized by the introduction of gill-nets with glass-ball floats, the catch becoming three times as large, while at least one hundred thousand dollars was saved annually in the single item of bait.
Early in July the salmon enter the river in immense numbers from the sea, and are caught by the natives in gill-nets, baskets, seines, weirs, traps, and a dozen other ingenious contrivances cut open, cleaned, and boned by the women, with the greatest skill and celerity, and hung in long rows upon horizontal poles to dry.
A stack of oars, seine-sticks, and harpoon-handles leaned against the roof; gill-nets festooned the little piazza, while a great iron caldron, that had evidently done service on a New Bedford whaler, had been utilized by the good housewife to capture the rain-water from the shingled roof. "Mornin' to ye, gentlemen.
A single man, Shoepack Sam was saying, would not have to be looking at the wreck of his wife in the morning; and this is when women were caught unawares in the gill-nets time is lowering for them. "They are pale about the gills then," he said. "They are just drowned fish. They have stayed in the nets too long." "No, it's not certain," said Rainbow Pete.
"Well, I rose early the next morning to go out with the old fisherman to his gill-nets. It would have done you good, as it did me, to see how merry every living thing was. The birds, how jolly they were, and how refreshing the breeze was that came stealing over the water, making one feel as if he would like to shout and hurrah in the buoyancy, the brightness, and glory of the morning.
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