The Country of the Pointed Firs. Sarah Orne Jewett
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side with great interest and excitement, while she skillfully handled the long line of hooks, and made scornful remarks upon worthless, bait-consuming creatures of the sea as she reviewed them and left them on the trawl or shook them off into the waves. At last we came to what she pronounced a proper haddock, and having taken him on board and ended his life resolutely, we went our way.
As we sailed along I listened to an increasingly delightful commentary upon the islands, some of them barren rocks, or at best giving sparse pasturage for sheep in the early summer. On one of these an eager little flock ran to the water’s edge and bleated at us so affectingly that I would willingly have stopped; but Mrs. Todd steered away from the rocks, and scolded at the sheep’s mean owner, an acquaintance of hers, who grudged the little salt and still less care which the patient creatures needed. The hot midsummer sun makes prisons of these small islands that are a paradise in early June, with their cool springs and short thick-growing grass. On a larger island, farther out to sea, my entertaining companion showed me with glee the small houses of two farmers who shared the island between them, and declared that for three generations the people had not spoken to each other even in times of sickness or death or birth. “When the news come that the war was over, one of ‘em knew it a week, and never stepped across his wall to tell the other,” she said. “There, they enjoy it; they’ve got to have somethin’ to interest ‘em in such a place; ‘tis a good deal more tryin’ to be tied to folks you don’t like than ‘tis to be alone. Each of ‘em tell the neighbors their wrongs; plenty likes to hear and tell again; them as fetch a bone’ll carry one, an’ so they keep the fight a-goin’. I must say I like variety myself; some folks washes Monday an’ irons Tuesday the whole year round, even if the circus is goin’ by!”
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