No man can predict what the sea will be an hour or two hence. Its character changes with each fluctuation of the tide; and a calm and halcyon lake may have become fierce and angry and tempest-tossed when the ebb turns and the flow sets in. There are times too, when a boat caught by the wind and drifted into a current would be as helpless as a cork in a mill-race; and when a whole fleet of fishing-boats might be blown out to sea, with perhaps half their number capsized. But, as a rule, having learnt caution with their hardihood from the very magnitude of the dangers which surround them, these Cornish men suffer as little by shipwreck as do the fishermen of safer bays; and though each cove has its own sad story, and every rock its victim, the worst cases of wreck have been those of larger vessels which have mistaken lights, or steered too close in shore, or been lost in the fogs that are so frequent about the Land's End. Or they may have been caught by the wind and the tide and driven dead on to a lee shore; as so often happens in the bay between Hartland and Padstow Points. But the more cautious the men are the less money they make; and though life is certainly more than meat, life without meat at all, or with only an insufficient quantity, is rather a miserable affair. The material well-being of the poor fellows who live in those picturesque little coves which are the delight and the despair of artists is not in a very satisfactory condition. By the law of aggregation, unification, whatever we like to call it--the law of the present day by which individuals are absorbed into bodies that work for wages for one master, instead of each man working for himself for his own hand--the independent fishermen are daily becoming fewer. Save at Whitesand Bay, where there is a 'poor man's seine' and 'a rich man's seine,' almost all the seine nets belong now to companies or partnerships of rich men; and in very few have the men themselves any share.