Chapter 8 - Page 2

ears
tingled at the comments on his rowing. Every dialect from Labrador
to Long Island, with Portuguese, Neapolitan, Lingua Franca,
French, and Gaelic, with songs and shoutings and new oaths,
rattled round him, and he seemed to be the butt of it all. For the
first time in his life he felt shy - perhaps that came from living
so long with only the "We're Heres" - among the scores of wild
faces that rose and fell with the reeling small craft. A gentle,
breathing swell, three furlongs from trough to barrel, would
quietly shoulder up a string of variously painted dories. They
hung for an instant, a wonderful frieze against the sky-line, and
their men pointed and hailed, Next moment the open mouths, waving
arms, and bare chests disappeared, while on another swell came up
an entirely new line of characters like paper figures in a toy
theatre. So Harvey stared. "Watch out!" said Dan, flourishing a
dip-net. "When I tell you dip, you dip. The caplin'll school any
time from naow on. Where'll we lay, Tom Platt?"

Pushing, shoving, and hauling, greeting old friends here and
warning old enemies there, Commodore Tom Platt led his little
fleet well to leeward of the general crowd, and immediately three
or four men began to haul on their anchors with intent to lee-bow
the "We're Heres". But a yell of laughter went up as a dory shot
from her station with exceeding speed, its occupant pulling madly
on the roding.

"Give her slack!" roared twenty voices. "Let him shake it out."

"What's the matter?" said Harvey, as the boat flashed away to the
southward. "He's anchored, isn't he?"

"Anchored, sure enough, but his graound-tackle's kinder shifty,"
said Dan, laughing. "Whale's fouled it. . . . Dip, Harve! Here
they come!"

The sea round them clouded and darkened, and then frizzed up in
showers of tiny silver fish, and over a space of five or six acres
the cod began to leap like trout in May; while behind the cod
three or four broad grey-black backs broke the water into boils.

Then everybody shouted and tried to haul up his anchor to get
among the school, and fouled his neighbour's line and said what
was in his heart, and dipped furiously with his dip-net, and
shrieked cautions and advice to his companions, while the deep
fizzed like freshly opened soda-water, and cod, men, and whales
together flung in upon the luckless bait. Harvey was nearly
knocked overboard by the handle of Dan's net. But in all the wild
tumult he noticed, and never forgot, the wicked, set little eye -
something like a circus elephant's eye - of a whale that drove
along almost level with the water, and, so he said, winked at him.
Three boats found their rodings fouled by these reckless mid-sea
hunters, and