By the seashore whole communities turned to the teeming ocean for the means of life. Every fishing vessel that left the towns of Cape Ann and Cape Cod carried, with its crew of grown men, a boy of ten or twelve to learn "the art and mystery" of fishing. He had a name--a "cut-tail." He cut a wedge-shaped bit from the tail of every fish he caught, and in the sorting-out and counting-up at the close of the trip his share of the profits was thus plainly indicated. Long before these fishing industries were thoroughly organized the early chroniclers told of the share of boys in fishing. Even John Smith stirred up English stay-at-homes, saying:-- "Young boyes, girles, salvages or any others, bee they never such idlers, may turne, carry, and returne fish without shame, or either greate paine: hee is very idle that is past twelve years of age and cannot doe so much; and shee is very old that cannot spin a thread to catch them." It was natural that boys born in seashore towns should turn to the sea. They found in the incoming ships their sole connecting link with the outside world. Romance, sentiment, mystery, deviltry, haloed the sailor. He was ever welcome to the public, and ever a source of interest whether in tarry working garb, or gay shore togs of flapping trousers, crimson sash, eelskin and cutlasses, or perhaps garbed like Captain Creedon, who appeared in Boston in the year 1662 dressed, so says the letter of a Boston minister, "in a strange habitt with a 4 Cornered Capp instead of a hatt and his Breeches hung with Ribbons from the Wast downward a great depth one over the other like the Shingles of a house." Naturally enough "the boys made an outcry and wondered." Can it be wondered that two centuries of New England boys, stirred in their quiet round of life by similar gay comets and tales of adventure, have had a passionate ichor in their veins of longing for "the magic and the mystery of the sea," that they have eagerly gone before the mast, and rounded the Horn, and come home master seamen when in their teens. I know a New England family of dignity and wealth in which six successive generations of sons have gone to sea in their boyhood, some of later years running away from home to do so. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1787,--so tells a newspaper of that date,--were living a man and wife who had been married about twenty years, and had eighteen sons, of whom ten were then at sea. CHAPTER XVI NEEDLECRAFT AND DECORATIVE ARTS _She wrought all Needleworks that Women exercise, With Pin Frame or Stoole all Pictures Artificiall, Curious Knots or Traits that Fancy could devise, Beasts, Birds, or Flowers even as things Naturall._ --_Epitaph of Elizabeth Lucar. Church St. Michael, Crooked Lane, London, 1537._