Then is Jimmy 'proper all right.' Then does he brighten up. "How many have us catched?" he asks. The sight of him fishing in the stern-sheets re-assures me as to his future, about which I am sometimes fearful, just as some men are depressed by a helpless baby because they foresee, imaginatively, the poor little creature's life and all possible troubles before it. When I watch Jimmy in house, rather naughty perhaps, or when I hear Bessie, fresh from the twaddle that they put into her head at school, saying, "If Dad'd earn more money, mother, us could hae a shop an' he could buy me a pi-anno;" or when, as I am out and about with the boats, a grubby small hand is suddenly slipped into mine and a joyful chirping voice says, "What be yu 'bout?"--then, and at a score of other times, I am fearful of what they may be led to do with Jimmy; fearful lest they may put the little chap to an inland trade where he is almost bound to become a lesser man than his father, be removed from the enlarging influence of the sea, and have it given him as the height of ambition to grow up a dram-drinking or psalm-smiting, Sunday-top-hatted tradesmen. Then I desire savagely to have the power of a God, not that I might direct his life--he can sail his own boat better than I,--but that I might keep the ring clear for him to fight in, and prevent foul play. What indeed would I not do to remove some of the guilt of us educated men and women who force our ideas on people without asking whether they need them, without caring how maimed, stultified and potent for evil the ideas become in process of transmission, without seeing that for the age-old wisdom of those whom we call the uneducated we are substituting a jerry-built knowledge--got from books--which we only half believe in ourselves? New lamps for old! The pity of it! The farce! But when I watch Jimmy fishing, I grow confident that the sea has its grip on him; that it will drag him to itself as it dragged his father from the grocery store; that whatever happens, it will always be part of his life to keep trivialities, meannesses and education from quite closing in around him. 17 [Sidenote: "_THE FISHER FATHER AND CHILD_"] _The Fisher Father and Child_ As I pulled the boat across a loppy sea-- The bumping and splashing boat, With the sail flapping round my head, And the pile of mackerel amidships ever growing larger and lovelier in the light-- And the sun rose behind the cliffs to eastward, and the sky became lemon-yellow (A graciously coloured veil twixt the earth and all mystery beyond), And the wavelets sparkled and darted like ten thousand fishes at play in the ambient dawn,-- It seemed that the sky and the sea and the earth gathered themselves together, And became one vast kind eye, looking into the stern of the boat, At the father and boy.