But if you cannot afford the expense of your own dredge and boat, and the time and trouble necessary to follow the occupation scientifically, yet every trawler and oyster-boat will afford you a tolerable satisfaction. Go on board one of these; and while the trawl is down, spend a pleasant hour or two in talking with the simple, honest, sturdy fellows who work it, from whom (if you are as fortunate as I have been for many a year past) you may get many a moving story of danger and sorrow, as well as many a shrewd practical maxim, and often, too, a living recognition of God, and the providence of God, which will send you home, perhaps, a wiser and more genial man. And when the trawl is hauled, wait till the fish are counted out, and packed away, and then kneel down and inspect (in a pair of Mackintosh leggings, and your oldest coat) the crawling heap of shells and zoophytes which remains behind about the decks, and you will find, if a landsman, enough to occupy you for a week to come. Nay, even if it be too calm for trawling, condescend to go out in a dingy, and help to haul some honest fellow’s deep-sea lines and lobster-pots, and you will find more and stranger things about them than even fish or lobsters: though they, to him who has eyes to see, are strange enough. I speak from experience; for it was not so very long ago that, in the north of Devon, I found sermons, not indeed in stones, but in a creature reputed among the most worthless of sea-vermin. I had been lounging about all the morning on the little pier, waiting, with the rest of the village, for a trawling breeze which would not come. Two o’clock was past, and still the red mainsails of the skiffs hung motionless, and their images quivered head downwards in the glassy swell, “As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.”