The “tackle-boxes” on the beach at Rock-a-Nore are a peculiar feature of the fisherman’s quarter. They are tall, tower-like, black-tarred wooden sheds of four or five storeys’ height, built in rows at right-angles to the sea, and identified by letters of the alphabet. In them are stored the nets and miscellaneous gear of the smacks. Generally groups of depressed, guernseyed, weather-beaten smacksmen may be seen and spoken with while mending their tackle, and are as unlike the fishermen and longshore folk of the comic artists as well may be. They are not so phenomenally broad in the “starn,” so pot-bellied, nor so patchy; and, instead of having that little dense patch of spade-beard, like the chin-beards of Rameses and other typical Egyptian statues, as inseparable from the conventional fisherman as a nimbus from the head of a saint, they are either very full-whiskered or quite clean-shaven. But the conventional fisherman will no more become obsolete than the conventional burglar with his ankle-jacks, his fur cap, and his furtive glance; or the conventional John Bull. There is nothing like them on earth, but they are necessary abstractions for the feeding of unimaginative minds. You may read in the guide-books how the term “Chop-back” will rouse a Hastings fisherman to fury, and timid, yet inquiring people, approach the subject with them apologetically; but I declare they turn a puzzled look upon you, and seem hardly to comprehend the meaning of what is supposed to be a very offensive name—“Hastings Chop-backs,” deriving from the supposed descent of the Hastingers from those Norse rovers whose terrible axes cleaved their enemies down the back from skull to chine. Traditions of this undoubted antiquity are deserving of all respect, and probably the Hastings fisherfolk are descendants of those fierce rovers, but they are the mildest vikings it is possible to conceive, and would no more think of chopping any one down the back than they would dream of refusing a drink, even though the Blue Ribbonites of the Mission Church are active among them. “Fishin’ ain’t wot it wur” is the general verdict; neither for “hur’n”—that is to say, “herring”—in the fore-part of the year, nor for mackerel in the after; yet the fish-market on the Stade seems busier than ever in the mornings, and over a thousand people subsist upon the proceeds of the harvest of the sea. But the fisherman is forced to cruise greater distances than before, the Channel being fished out and clean-swept by trawlers. Indeed, to listen to the doleful talk of a Hastings fisherman, one might think that not a single sprat or mackerel swam the English Channel between the North Foreland and the Lizard.