How like a dream it was when I bent over a pool of water one pleasant morning and saw that the ocean had dashed its spray over me and made me a fisherman ! There was the tarpaulin , the baize shirt , the oilcloth trousers and seven-league boots , and there my own features , but so reddened with sunburn and sea-breezes that methought I had another face , and on other shoulders too . The seagulls and the loons and I had now all one trade : we skimmed the crested waves and sought our prey beneath them , the man with as keen enjoyment as the birds . Always when the east grew purple I launched my dory , my little flat-bottomed skiff , and rowed cross-handed to Point Ledge , the Middle Ledge , or perhaps beyond Egg Rock ; often , too , did I anchor off Dread Ledge -- a spot of peril to ships unpiloted -- and sometimes spread an adventurous sail and tracked across the bay to South Shore , casting my lines in sight of Scituate . Ere nightfall I hauled my skiff high and dry on the beach , laden with red rock-cod or the white-bellied ones of deep water , haddock bearing the black marks of St. Peter 's fingers near the gills , the long-bearded hake whose liver holds oil enough for a midnight lamp , and now and then a mighty halibut with a back broad as my boat . In the autumn I toled and caught those lovely fish the mackerel . When the wind was high , when the whale-boats anchored off the Point nodded their slender masts at each other and the dories pitched and tossed in the surf , when Nahant Beach was thundering three miles off and the spray broke a hundred feet in the air round the distant base of Egg Rock , when the brimful and boisterous sea threatened to tumble over the street of our village , -- then I made a holiday on shore . Many such a day did I sit snugly in Mr. Bartlett 's store , attentive to the yarns of Uncle Parker -- uncle to the whole village by right of seniority , but of Southern blood , with no kindred in New England . His figure is before me now enthroned upon a mackerel-barrel -- a lean old man of great height , but bent with years and twisted into an uncouth shape by seven broken limbs ; furrowed , also , and weatherworn , as if every gale for the better part of a century had caught him somewhere on the sea . He looked like a harbinger of tempest -- a shipmate of the Flying Dutchman . After innumerable voyages aboard men-of-war and merchantmen , fishing-schooners and chebacco-boats , the old salt had become master of a hand-cart , which he daily trundled about the vicinity , and sometimes blew his fish-horn through the streets of Salem . One of Uncle Parker 's eyes had been blown out with gunpowder , and the other did but glimmer in its socket . Turning it upward as he spoke , it was his delight to tell of cruises against the French and battles with his own shipmates , when he and an antagonist used to be seated astride of a sailor 's chest , each fastened down by a spike-nail through his trousers , and there to fight it out . Sometimes he expatiated on the delicious flavor of the hagden , a greasy and goose-like fowl which the sailors catch with hook and line on the Grand Banks . He dwelt with rapture on an interminable winter at the Isle of Sables , where he had gladdened himself amid polar snows with the rum and sugar saved from the wreck of a West India schooner . And wrathfully did he shake his fist as he related how a party of Cape Cod men had robbed him and his companions of their lawful spoils and sailed away with every keg of old Jamaica , leaving him not a drop to drown his sorrow . Villains they were , and of that wicked brotherhood who are said to tie lanterns to horses ' tails to mislead the mariner along the dangerous shores of the Cape . Even now I seem to see the group of fishermen with that old salt in the midst . One fellow sits on the counter , a second bestrides an oil-barrel , a third lolls at his length on a parcel of new cod-lines , and another has planted the tarry seat of his trousers on a heap of salt which will shortly be sprinkled over a lot of fish . They are a likely set of men .
Some have voyaged to the East Indies or the Pacific , and most of them have sailed in Marblehead schooners to Newfoundland ; a few have been no farther than the Middle XXXXX , and one or two have always fished along the shore ; but , as Uncle Parker used to say , they have all been christened in salt water and know more than men ever learn in the bushes .
Banks Bartlett Parker Salem daily dory gills hand-cart morning spike-nail