One goes down to the harbour after breakfast the next morning to see what has been the result of the night’s fishing.  One does not really need to go down.  One can see it afar off.  There is movement as at the building of a city.  On every boat men are busy emptying the nets, disentangling the fish that have been caught by the gills, tumbling them in a liquid mass into the bottom of the boat.  One can hardly see the fish separately.  They flow into one another.  They are a pool of quick-silver.  One is amazed, as the disciples must have been amazed at the miraculous draught.  Everything is covered with their scales.  The fishermen are spotted as if with confetti.  Their hands, their brown coats, their boots are a mass of white-and-blue spots.  The labourers with the gurries—­great blue boxes that are carried like Sedan-chairs between two pairs of handles—­come up alongside, and the fish are ladled into the gurries from tin pans.  As each gurry is filled the men hasten off with it to where the auctioneer is standing.  With the help of a small notebook and a lead pencil he auctions it before an outsider can wink, and the gurry is taken a few yards further, where women are pouring herrings into barrels.  They, too, are covered with fish-scales from head to foot.  They are dabbled like a painter’s palette.  So great is the haul that every cart in the country-side has come down to lend a hand.  The fish are poured into the carts over the sides of the boats like water.  Old fishermen stand aside and look on with a sense of having wasted their youth.  They recall the time when they went fishing in the North Sea and had to be content to sell their catch at a shilling and sixpence a cran—­a cran being equal to four gurries, or about a thousand herrings.  Who is there now who would sell even a hundred herrings for one and sixpence?  Who is there who would sell a hundred herrings for ten and sixpence?  Yet one gig alone this morning has brought in fourteen thousand herrings.  No wonder that there is an atmosphere of excitement in the harbour.  No wonder that the carts almost run over you as they make journey after journey between boat and barrel.  No wonder that three different sorts of sea-gulls—­the herring gull, the lesser black-headed gull, and the black-backed gull—­have gathered about us in screaming multitudes and fill the air like a snowstorm.  Every child in the town seems to be making for home with its finger in a fish’s mouth, or in two fishes’ mouths, or in three fishes’ mouths.  Artists have hurried down to the harbour, and have set up their easels on every spot that is not already occupied by a fish barrel or an auctioneer or a man with a knife in his teeth preparing to gut a dogfish.  The town has lost its head.  It has become Midas for the day.  Every time it opens its mouth a herring comes out.  A doom of herrings has come upon us.  The smell rises to heaven.  It is as though we were breathing fish-scales.  Even the pretty blue overalls of the children have become