On reaching Douarnenez in the summer of 1839 I wrote:—­“The whole population and the existence of Douarnenez depend on the sardine fishery.  This delicious little fish, which the gourmands of Paris so much delight in, when preserved in oil, and sent to their capital in those little tin boxes whose look must be familiar to all who have frequented the Parisian breakfast-houses” [but is now more familiar to all who have entered any grocers shop throughout the length and breadth of England], “is still more exquisite when eaten fresh on the shores which it frequents.  They are caught in immense quantities along the whole of the southern coast of Brittany, and on the western shore of Finisterre as far to the northward as Brest, which, I believe, is the northern limit of the fishery.  They come into season about the middle of June, and are then sold in great quantities in all the markets of southern Brittany at two, three, or four sous a dozen, according to the abundance of the fishery and the distance of the market from the coast.  I was told that the commerce in sardines along the coast from l’Orient to Brest amounted to three millions of francs annually.”

At the present day it must be enormously larger.  I remember well the exceeding plentifulness of the little fishes—­none of them so large as many of those which now fill the so-called sardine boxes—­when I was at Douarnenez in 1839.  All the men, women, and children in the place seemed to be feasting upon them all day long.  Plates with heaps of them fried and piled up crosswise, like timber in a timber-yard, were to be seen outdoors and indoors, wherever three or four people could be found together.  All this was a thing of the past when I revisited Douarnenez in 1866.  Every fish was then needed for the tinning business.  They were to be had of course by ordering and paying for them, but very few indeed were consumed by the population of the place.

And this subject reminds me of another fishery which I witnessed a few months ago—­last March—­at Sestri di Ponente, near Genoa.  We frequently saw nearly the whole of the fisher population of the place engaged in dragging from the water on to the sands enormously long nets, which had been previously carried out by boats to a distance not more I think than three or four hundred yards from the shore.  From these nets, when at last they were landed after an hour or so of continual dragging by a dozen or twenty men and women, were taken huge baskets-full of silvery little fish sparkling in the sun, exactly like whitebait.  I had always supposed that whitebait was a specialty of the Thames.  Whether an icthyologist would have pronounced the little Sestri fishes to be the same creatures as those which British statesmen consume at Greenwich I cannot say; but we ate them frequently at the hotel under the name of gianchetti, and could find no difference between them and the Greenwich delicacy.  The season for them did