THE FISHERMAN OF FORT ROUGE. BY MRS. GORE. EVERY mechanical calling exercises a powerful moral influence over its followers. Those who go down to the sea in ships, above all those whose prosperity is dependent on the stirring chances of wind and tide, are apt to be impetuous, wilful, and wayward, as the elements wherewith they have to struggle. Even when soft of heart, the sailor is hard of hand. He has no leisure for the expansion of those milder gradations of feeling which form the common bond between man and mankind. His vocation opposes a perpetual barrier to communion with his fellow-creatures. He loves few, and loves them ardently; and his animosities are equally circumscribed, and of equal intensity. He carries with him to the great deep affections cherished with superstitious devotion; or some cause of deep offence, over which he broods in the desolation of that vast loneliness, till it seems to amplify and fill the mighty solitude around. In almost all fishing-towns, more especially those of the Continent, there is a land population and a sea population scrupulously distinct. In the French ports of the Channel, such as Calais and Dieppe, the fishermen have their quarter, their patois, their costume, their characteristic sports and dances, to which they adhere with all the prejudice of caste; standing apart from their fellowtownsmen, from whom they are divided only by a street or a brook, as tenaciously as Jew from Christian, or Mussulman from Hindoo. And thus, their peculiarities of nature become hereditary. Even in early childhood, the fisherman's boy is as complete a miniature of the fisherman, as the young shrimp of the old one. During the summer season, when the Calaisians and mariners of the Pollet (the fishing suburb of Dieppe) frequent, on Sundays and holidays, the same public gardens or dancing-booths as their fellow-citizens, the matelot, in his canvas trowsers and capacious boots, is never seen to give his arm to the tripping grisette or fawn-eyed paysanne ; nor would the hard-featured matelotte, whose complexion vies with the glaring red of her short linsey woolsey petticoat of unnumbered breadths, deign to bestow a moment's attention on the smartest mercer of the market-place, or the richest grazier of the neighbouring marshes. Their hoarse, harsh voices, their rugged faces, their recklessness tempered by the superstitious piety predominant in simple minds engaged in a perilous course of life, seem to adapt them inextricably for each other. |