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Jason Vandervelde's fervent praises hadn't done justice to this bit of untouched Eden tucked away in a bend of the Maine coast. It gave him what his heart craved beauty, fragrance, stillness. A few weather-beaten old men, digging clams, dragging lobster-pots, or handling a boat. A few quiet women, busy with household affairs. No one to have to talk to. No one to ask him questions.
Fishermen in the Isle of Wight send all the way to the Midlands to get the little scarlet withes required for making lobster-pots. The cycle of dry seasons seems to be indefinitely prolonged. During the period, now lasting since 1893, in which we have had practically no wet summers, and many very hot ones, a very curious phenomenon has been remarked upon the high and dry chalk downs.
Silly Hans was not with him, for both he and Madeleine had agreed that it was not necessary when they were going only for a row; and to-day all there was to do was to provide the lobster-pots with fresh bait for the night. One after another the fishermen rowed out through the narrow entrance.
Bloodcurdling tales of lobster-pots carried to sea filled the air; but the air was as blandly unconscious of ever having been a fury as a lady who has found her lost temper. Swift alternations of weather are so characteristic of our colonial climate that the other afternoon I went out with my umbrella against the raw, cold rain of the morning, and had to raise it against the broiling sun.
Here were twisted iron rods, fish-baskets, broken lobster-pots, rotting seines and tangled, useless nets some used as coverings for coops of restless chickens old worn-out rope, tangled rigging everything that a fisherman who had spent his life on Barnegat beach could pull from the surf or find stranded on the sand.
One of our amusements was to watch boat-building accomplished by tying a bundle of bamboos together at each end and pushing them out into shape with wooden stretchers. They have enormous lobster-pots, 6 feet to 8 feet in diameter, made of matting woven with split bamboo, in patterns something like the seats of our chairs.
'It's just like eel-pots and lobster-pots, said Cyril, 'the baskets only open from outside I vote we stay. So they stayed. 'That's Tyre over there, said the Captain, who was evidently trying to be civil. He pointed to a great island rock, that rose steeply from the sea, crowned with huge walls and towers. There was another city on the mainland.
The Swampscott fishermen still relate How a strange sea-monster stole thair bait; How their nets were tangled in loops and knots, And they found dead crabs in their lobster-pots. Poor Danvers grieved for her blasted crops, And Wilmington mourned over mildewed hops. A blight played havoc with Beverly beans, It was all the work of those hateful queans!
These were filled with shells, unexploded, and behind the trenches were hundreds more of these baskets, some for the shells of the siege-guns, as large as lobster-pots or umbrella-stands, and others, each with three compartments, for shrapnel. In gutters along the road and in the wheat-fields these brass shells flashed in the sunshine like tiny mirrors.
When they were safely bestowed among the lobster-pots with which the boat was laden, the man leaned on his oars and eyed them critically. "Short of sense, ain't ye?" he remarked genially. "Nigh about drownded that time or I 'm no skipper! If ye ain't bent on destruction ye 'd better get into dry clothes. Ye 're as wet as a mess of drownded kittens. Tell me where you live and I 'll take you home."
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