Take the obituaries of fishermen.  “In his prime, it is said, there was not a better skipper in the Gloucester fishing fleet.”  Take disasters to schooners, smacks, and trawlers.  “The crew were landed, but lost all their belongings.”  New vessels, sales, etc.  “The sealing schooner Tillie B., whose career in the South Seas is well known, is reported to have been sold to a moving-picture firm.”  Sponges from the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.  “To most people, familiar only with the sponges of the shops, the animal as it comes from the sea would be rather unrecognisable.”  Why, take anything you please!  It is such stuff as stories are.  And as you eat your fish from the store how little do you reck of the glamour of what you are doing!

However, as it seems to me unlikely that a man of genius will be a fish reporter shortly I will myself do the best I can to paint the tapestry of the scenes of his calling.  The advertisement in the newspaper read:  “Wanted—­Reporter for weekly trade paper.”  Many called, but I was chosen.  Though, doubtless, no man living knew less about fish than I.

The news stands are each like a fair, so laden are they with magazines in bright colours.  It would seem almost as if there were a different magazine for every few hundred and seven-tenth person, as the statistics put these matters.  And yet, it seems, there is a vast, a very vast, periodical literature of which we, that is, magazine readers in general, know nothing whatever.  There is, for one, that fine, old, standard publication, Barrel and Box, devoted to the subjects and the interests of the coopering industry; there is, too, The Dried Fruit Packer and Western Canner, as alert a magazine as one could wish—­in its kind; and from the home of classic American literature comes The New England Tradesman and Grocer.  And so on.  At the place alone where we went to press twenty-seven trade journals were printed every week, from one for butchers to one for bankers.

The Fish Industries Gazette—­Ah, yes!  For some reason not clear (though it is an engaging thing, I think) the word “gazette” is the great word among the titles of trade journals.  There are The Jewellers’ Gazette and The Women’s Wear Gazette and The Poulterers’ Gazette (of London), and The Maritime Gazette (of Halifax), and other gazettes quite without number.  This word “gazette” makes its appeal, too, curiously enough, to those who christen country papers; and trade journals have much of the intimate charm of country papers.  The “trade” in each case is a kind of neighbourly community, separated in its parts by space, but joined in unity of sympathy.  “Personals” are a vital feature of trade papers.  “Walter Conner, who for some time has conducted a bakery and fish market at Hudson, N.Y., has removed to Fort Edward, leaving his brother Ed in charge at the Hudson place of business.”