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Updated: June 10, 2025
The pilchard belongs to the herring family, but is somewhat smaller, and differs from that fish in external appearance, having a shorter head and a more compact body; its scales, too, are rather longer than those of the common herring.
Swan, however, dropped the question of Pilchard's marriage. "You mean, I suppose, that you won't work at night." "I can't. I'm not well enough." Swan grunted and sighed and stretched all his limbs, shaking his great shoulders as if he were trying to shake out the ague. Then he cleared his throat again and turned to Pilchard. "See here, Pilchard, it's time we came to some understanding."
He found the "Dog and Pilchard" easily enough. Just beyond it the river was caught into a kind of waterfall by a ridge of stone that projected almost into mid-stream. At high tide it tumbled over this obstruction with an astonished splash and gurgle. Even when the river was at its lowest there was a dim chattering struggle at this point.
Consequently all through the last week of July, when the word "Germany" began to be printed in large type in Press headlines, the drifters putting out nightly on the watch for the pilchard harvest carried each a copy of The Western Morning News or The Western Daily Mercury to be read aloud, discussed, expounded under the cuddy lamp in the long hours between shooting the nets and hauling them.
As there are 3,000 pilchards in each hogshead, the catch amounted to nearly eleven million fish! The value of these might be 3 pounds a hogshead, and the clear profit about 1 pound a hogshead, so that it is no wonder we hear of fortunes having been made in a few hauls of the pilchard seines.
"That's a queer business," said Swan, when he had finished. "How so?" "Man alive, haven't you read what you've signed your name to?" "Certainly I've read it." "And you think you can put the job through in a year?" "Why not?" asked Pilchard, with his "cock-sure" smile.
He was not a man who liked to be jostled, and he was the more uncomfortable in that he discovered that his immediate neighbour was Samuel Hogg, the stout and rubicund landlord of the "Dog and Pilchard" of Seatown. With him was his pretty daughter Annie. Near to them were Mr. John Curtis and Mr. Samuel Croppet, two of the Town Councillors.
"Pilcher, or Pilchard, perhaps! It couldn't be Picture. What did he tell you about her?" "Oh dear a many things! Mrs. Picture had been out to sea, in a ship. But she will be very old, too, Mrs. Picture. I call to mind now, that the dear child couldn't tell me from Mrs. Picture when he first came, by reason of the white hair. So she may be nigh my own age."
That cool summer day just a year ago that he had spent on the coast of Maine, whither he had gone to see Pilchard about some final arrangements for their journey to Mexico Pilchard had introduced him to the girl he was going to marry, and it had somehow happened that he and she had taken a short walk together along a cliff where some pines were growing, and which looked forlornly enough across the solitary ocean.
It was very seldom that any harm was done. Once a serious fire broke out amongst the old wooden houses down on the river, and some of them were burnt to the ground, a fate that no one deplored; once a sailor was murdered in a drunken squabble at "The Dog and Pilchard," the wildest of the riverside hostelries; and once a Canon was caught and stripped and ducked in the waters of the Pol by a mob who resented his gentle appeals that they should try to prefer lemonade to gin; but these were the only three catastrophes in all the history of the fair.
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