well, always filled with sea-water, taking the place of the fishbins.  The deck, forward of the trunk cabin, is flush, and provided with “knockdown” partitions, so that hundreds of flapping fish may be confined to any desired portion.  Amidships of the bankers rises a pile of five or six dories, the presence of which tells the story of the schooner’s purpose, for fishing on the Grand Banks for cod is mainly done with trawls which must be tended from dories—­a method which has resulted in countless cruel tragedies.

The lives of the men who go down to the sea in ships are always full of romance, the literary value of which has been fully exploited by such writers of sea stories as Cooper and Clark Russell.  But the romance of the typical sailor’s life is that which grows out of a ceaseless struggle with the winds and waves, out of world-wide wanderings, and encounters with savages and pirates.  It is the romance which makes up melodrama, rather than that of the normal life.  The early New England fishermen, however, were something more than vagrants on the surface of the seas.  In their lives were often combined the peaceful vocations of the farmer or woodsman, with the adventurous calling of the sailor.  For months out of the year, the Maine fisherman would be working in the forests, felling great trees, guiding the tugging ox-teams to the frozen rivers, which with spring would float the timber down to tidewater.  When winter’s grip was loosened, he, like the sturdy logs his axe had shaped, would find his way to where the air was full of salt, and the owners of pinks and schooners were painting their craft, running over the rigging, and bargaining with the outfitters for stores for the spring cruise.  From Massachusetts and Rhode Island farms men would flock to the little ports, leaving behind the wife and younger boys to take care of the homestead, until the husband and father returned from the banks in the fall, with his summer’s earnings.  His luck at fishing, her luck with corn and calves and pigs, determined the scale of the winter’s living.  Some of the fishermen were not only farmers, as well, but ship-builders and ship-owners, too.  If the farm happened to front on some little cove, the frame of a schooner would be set up there on the beach, and all winter long the fisherman-farmer-builder would work away with adze and saw and hammer, putting together the stout hull that would defend him in time against the shock of the north-east sea.  His own forest land supplied the oak trees, keelson, ribs, and stem.  The neighboring sawmill shaped his planks.  One lucky cruise as a hand on a fishing boat owned by a friend would earn him enough to pay for the paint and cordage.  With Yankee ingenuity he shaped the iron work at his own forge—­evading in its time the stupid British law that forbade the colonists to make nails or bolts.  Two winters’ labor would often give the thrifty builder a staunch boat of his own, to be christened the “Polly Ann,” or the “Mary Jane”—­more loyal to family ties than to poetic euphony were the Yankee fishermen—­with which he would drive into the teeth of the north-east gale, breaking through the waves as calmly as in early spring at home he forced his plough through the stubble.