“And now we have time to look about us—­to compare notes on each other’s successes—­to straighten our backbones, nearly broken and aching horribly with the constant reaching over; to examine our fingers, cut to pieces and grown sensationless with the perpetual dragging of small lines across them—­to—­’There, the skipper’s got a bite!  Here they are again, boys, and big fellows, too!’ Everybody rushes once more to the rail, and business commences again, but not at so fast a rate as before.  By-and-by there is another cessation, and we hoist our jib and run off a little way, into a new berth.

“While running across, I take the first good look at the state of affairs in general.  We lie, as before said, nearly in the center of the whole fleet, which from originally covering an area of perhaps fifteen miles each way, has ‘knotted up’ into a little space, not above two miles square.  In many places, although the sea is tolerably rough, the vessels lie so closely together that one could almost jump from one to the other.  The greatest skill and care are necessary on such occasions to keep them apart, and prevent the inevitable consequences of a collision, a general smash-up of masts, booms, bulwarks, etc.  Yet a great fish-day like this rarely passes off without some vessel sustaining serious damage.  We thread our way among the vessels with as much care and as daintily as a man would walk over ground covered with eggs; and finally get into a berth under the lee of a vessel which seems to hold the fish pretty well.  Here we fish away by spells, for they have become ‘spirty,’ that is, they are capricious, and appear and disappear suddenly.”

[Illustration:  TRAWLING FROM A DORY]

Three causes make the occupation of those fishermen who go for cod and halibut to the Newfoundland Banks extra hazardous—­the almost continual fog, the swift steel Atlantic liners always plowing their way at high speed across the fishing grounds, heedless of fog or darkness, and the custom of fishing with trawls which must be tended from dories.  The trawl, which is really only an extension of hand-lines, is a French device adopted by American fishermen early in the last century.  One long hand-line, supported by floats, is set at some distance from the schooner.  From it depend a number of short lines with baited hooks, set at brief intervals.  The fisherman, in his dory, goes from one to the other of these lines pulling them in, throwing the fish in the bottom of the boat and rebaiting his hooks.  When his dory is full he returns with his load to the schooner—­if he can find her.

That is the peril ever present to the minds of the men in the dory—­the danger of losing the schooner.  On the Banks the sea is always running moderately high, and the great surges, even on the clearest days, will often shut out the dories from the vision of the lookout.  The winds and the currents tend to sweep the little fishing-boats away, and though a schooner with five or six dories out