There was just space for the narrow and sandy street between the beach in front and a precipitous hill that lifted its rocky forehead in the rear among a waste of juniper-bushes and the wild growth of a broken pasture . The village was picturesque in the variety of its edifices , though all were rude . Here stood a little old hovel , built , perhaps , of driftwood , there a row of boat-houses , and beyond them a two-story dwelling of dark and weatherbeaten aspect , the whole intermixed with one or two snug cottages painted white , a sufficiency of pig-styes and a shoemaker 's shop . Two grocery stores stood opposite each other in the centre of the village . These were the places of resort at their idle hours of a hardy throng of fishermen in red baize shirts , oilcloth trousers and boots of brown leather covering the whole leg -- true seven-league boots , but fitter to wade the ocean than walk the earth . The wearers seemed amphibious , as if they did but creep out of salt water to sun themselves ; nor would it have been wonderful to see their lower limbs covered with clusters of little shellfish such as cling to rocks and old ship-timber over which the tide ebbs and flows . When their fleet of boats was weather-bound , the butchers raised their price , and the spit was busier than the frying-pan ; for this was a place of fish , and known as such to all the country round about . The very air was fishy , being perfumed with dead sculpins , hard-heads and dogfish strewn plentifully on the beach . -- You see , children , the village is but little changed since your mother and I were young . 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 XXXXX Uncle Parker 's eyes had been blown out with gunpowder , and the other did but glimmer in its socket .
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