Scituate is different: different from Cohasset, with its superbly bold coast and its fashionable folk; different from Hingham, with its air of settled inland dignity. Scituate has a quaintness, a casualness, the indescribable air of a land's-end spot. The fine houses in Scituate are refreshingly free from pretension; the winds that have twisted the trees into Rackham-like grotesques have blown away falsity and formality. Scituate life has always been along the shore. It is from the shore that coot-shooting used to furnish a livelihood to many a Scituate man, and still lures the huntsmen in the fine fall weather. It is the peculiar formation of the shore which has developed a small, clinker-built boat, and made the town famous for day fishing. It is along the shore that the unique and picturesque mossing industry is still carried on, and along the shore that the well-known colony of literary folk have settled. Scituate's history is really a fishing history, for as early as 1633 a fishing station was established here, and in course of time the North River, winding twenty miles through green meadows to the sea, was once the scene of more shipbuilding than any other river in New England. There is nothing more indicative of the Yankees' shrewd practicality than the early settlers' instant appreciation of the financial and economic potentialities of the fishing-trade. The Spaniard sought for gold in the new country, or contented himself with the fluctuating fur trade with its demoralizing slack seasons. But the New Englander promptly applied himself to the mundane pursuit of cod and mackerel. Everybody fished. As John Smith, in his "Description of New England," says: "Young boyes and girles, salvages or any other, be they never such idlers, may turne, carry, and returne fish without shame or either great pain: he is very idle that is past twelve years of age and cannot doe so much: and shee is very old that cannot spin a thread to catch them."