Another tug, and another, and soon the work is fast and furious. It takes honest elbow-muscle, too, to haul ten pounds of floundering cod up five feet of freeboard to the rail and deck. Soon the deck is covered with the long, slim, gleaming bodies, and the boys of the schooner have man’s work in tossing them into the gurry-pen amidships. Before the pen is filled, the fishes stop biting as suddenly as they struck on, and there is a rest for a while to bait-up and clean down. If the signs hold good, the skipper will order the men out to set trawls, for the smell of the dead fish sometimes drives the school away. HANDLING THE TRAWLS The “trawls” are only an elaboration of the hand-lines. They are single lines, several hundred feet in length, with short lines and baited hooks at intervals. They are taken out by members of the crew in their dories, buoyed and anchored. It is the work of tending these trawls that takes the greatest skill and fearlessness. It is in the work of hauling and baiting the lines in all weathers that the greatest losses of life occur. There is no room on the decks of the schooners for heavy boats, and as many such craft are needed, five or six are piled together amidships. A block and purchase from aloft are their hoisting-tackle. They are handy boats, though light, and two men and a load of fish can weather the rough seas, if your fisherman is an adept with his oars. But they are mere cockle-shells at the best, and are tossed like feathers. The “codders” are reckless fellows, and they will put out to the trawls day after day in any kind of weather, fog or clear, wind or calm, with not even a beaker of water or a piece of pilot-bread. A LONELY NIGHT ON THE BROAD ATLANTIC A night alone on the broad Atlantic in an open dory seems to have no terrors for them. Each year adds its lists of casualties to those that have gone before. Fogs have shut in, seas have risen, and morning has dawned again and again with no sign of the missing men. Sometimes an upturned dory is found, with her name--the “Molly S.,” or the “Betty T.,” in honor of the owner’s shore-mate--on her pointed bow, but only the gray ocean can tell the story of the missing men. When the “Polly’s” day’s luck is run, all hands take stations for dressing down. It is the dirty part of the business; but so quickly is it done that the crew seems part of a mechanism, working like clockwork. Two men stand at the gurry-pen, their long knives gleaming red in the sunset. The fish is slit from throat to tail with one cut, and again on both sides of the neck. It then passes to the next man, who with a scoop of his hand drops the cod’s liver in a basket and sends the head and offal flying. The fish slides across the dressing-table, where the backbone is torn out by the third man, who throws it, finally, headless, cleaned, and open, into the washing-tub.