cluster closely. Innumerable fishing crafts lie at anchor, or are beached along the
shore; gaily-dressed natives pass hither and thither, engrossed in their work or
play; and the little brown bodies of the naked children fleck the yellow sands.
Seen across the dancing waves, and with the appearance of motion which, in this
steaming land, the heat-haze gives to even inanimate objects, this scene is
indescribably pretty, shining and alive.
But at dawn the prospect is different. The background is the same, but the colour
of the scene is less intense, though the dark waves have rosy lights in them
reflected from the ruddy sky of the dawn. A slowly paling fire shines here and
there upon the shore, and the cool land breeze blows seaward. Borne upon the
wind come stealing out a hundred graceful, noiseless fishing smacks. The men
aboard them are cold and sleepy. They sit huddled up in the stern, with their
sârongs drawn high about their shoulders, under the shadow of the palm-leaf
sail, which shows dark above them in the faint light of early morning. The only
sound is the whisper of the wind in the rigging, and the song of the forefoot as it
drives the water before it in little curving ripples. And so the fleet floats out and
out, and presently is lost on the glowing eastern sky-line. At sundown the boats
come racing back, heading for the sinking sun, borne on the evening wind,
which sets steadily shorewards, and at about the same hour the great seine-boats,
with their crews of labouring paddlers, beat out to sea.
So live they, so die they, year in and year out. Toiling and enduring, with no
hope or wish for change of scene. Delighting in such simple pleasures as their
poor homes afford; surrounded by beauties of nature, which they lack the soul to
appreciate; and yet experiencing that keen enjoyment which is born of dancing
waves, of pace, of action, and of danger, that thrilling throb of the red blood
through the veins, which, when all is said and done, makes up more than half of
the joy of living.
It was not always so with them, for within the memory of old men upon the
Coast, the Fisher Folk were once pirates to a man. The last survivor of those who
formed the old lawless bands was an intimate friend of mine own. When I last
saw him, a day or two before his death in 1891, he begged that I would do him
one final act of friendship by supplying him with a winding sheet, that he might
go decently to his grave under the sods and the spear-grass, bearing thither a
token of the love I bore him. It was a good shroud of fine white calico bought in
the bazaar, and it cost more than a dollar. But I found it very willingly, for I
remembered that I was aiding to remove from the face of the earth, and to lay in
his quiet resting-place, the last Pirate on the East Coast.