always rough, and covered with little scratches received while she baited the lines; but these were no miseries to Peggy, and her face always seemed composed and quiet.  She would not pass you without a word, and her voice was pleasant with low gutturals.  If her eyes reminded you of the sea, you put it down to a natural fancy.  They were not at all poetic or sentimental; for Peggy was a rough woman.  But something there was in the gleam of her pale clear eyes that made you think of the far northern seas, by the borders of which her forefathers in a remote time were probably born.  As I have said, Peggy could use very rough words when farmers’ wives tired her with too much chaffering; but mostly her face had a hard placidity that refreshed the mind, just as it is refreshed by considering the deliberate ways of harmless animals.

Towards eleven in the morning Peggy would be seated in her warm kitchen, beside a flat basket in which mysterious coils of brown twine wound round and round.  The brown twine had tied to it long lines of horse-hair snoods with sharp white hooks lashed on by slips of waxed thread.  Peggy baited one after another of these hooks and laid them dexterously so that the line might be shot overboard without entanglement.  You might sit down in the sanded kitchen to talk to the good woman if you were not nice about fishy odours.  If you led on to such subjects, she would bring out her store of ghostly stories:  how a dead lady walked in the shrubberies by the tower after the squire’s sons murdered her lover; and how the old clock in the tower had a queer light travelling over its face on one day of the year.  Or she would gossip about the folks in the place; telling you how poor Jemmy had lost money, and how old Adam had got a rare stocking, and him meeting the priest every day like a poor man.  You might smoke as much as you liked in Peggy’s kitchen; and for various reasons it was just as well to keep smoking:  the sanitary principles of Dr. Richardson are not known in the villages on the coast.  Peggy herself did not smoke, because it was not considered right for women to use tobacco until they were past the age of sixty-five.  After that they had their weekly allowance with the groceries.  In the evenings of bright days you saw Peggy at her best.  When the dusk fell, and the level sands shone with a deep smooth gloss, you would see strange figures bowing with rhythmic motions.  These figures were those of women.  All the women of the village turn out on the sand to hunt for sand-eels.  To catch a sand-eel requires long practice.  You take two iron hooks, and work them down deep in the sand when the tide has just gone.  With quick but steady movements, you make a series of deep “criss-crosses;” and when the fish is disturbed by the hooks you whip him smartly out, and put him in the basket before his magical wriggle has taken him deep into the sand again.  The women stooping over the shining floor look like ghostly harvesters reaping invisible crops.