The perpetual industry carried on by the coast people on the French foreshores is quite a sight, although it is a fish commerce of a humble and primitive kind. Even the little children contrive to make money by building fish-ponds, or erecting trenches, in which to gather salt, or in some other little industry incidental to sea-shore life. One occasionally encounters some abject creature groping about the rocks to obtain the wherewithal to sustain life. To these people all is fish that comes to hand; no creature, however slimy, that creeps about is allowed to escape, so long as it can be disguised by cookery into any kind of food for human beings. Some of the people have old rickety boats patched up with still older pieces of wood or leather, sails mended here and there, till it is difficult to distinguish the original portion from those that have been added to it; nets torn and darned till they are scarce able to hold a fish; and yet that boat and that crippled machinery are the stock in trade of perhaps two or three generations of a family, and the concern may have been founded half a century ago by the grandfather, who now sees around him a legion of hungry gamins that it would take a fleet of boats to keep in food and raiment. The moment the tide flows back, the foreshore is at once overrun with an army of hungry people, who are eager to clutch whatever fishy _debris_ the receding water may have left; the little pools are eagerly, nay hungrily, explored, and their contents grabbed with an anxiety that pertains only to poverty. At some places of the coast, however, a happier life is dawning on the people—the discovery of pisciculture has led to a traffic in oysters that, as I will by and by show, is surprising; indeed a new life has in consequence dawned on some districts, and where at one time there was poverty and its attendant squalor, there is now wealth and its handmaid prosperity.