“Treading” flounders was a unique kind of fishing that took a whole day from earliest dawn, but sometimes turned up a bigger yield of fish than one could carry home. A perfectly calm day was needed for that, when there was no “wash.” The boys followed the outgoing tide, tramping hard with bare feet in the soft sand and steering by the church on the island out in the sea. When they had gone as far as they wanted, they tramped back by another route, and then put in the long wait till the tide had come in and was ebbing again, building fires, catching crabs, or whatever they felt like. With the next ebb-tide came their harvest. Following their tracks of the morning, they would find, wherever they had made them deep enough, a little pool left by the receding waters, and in each pool one or two, and sometimes three, flounders about the size of my hand, very much like the Catalina sand dabs of the Pacific. These they would unceremoniously heave into a sack they carried between them, and before long it grew heavy with their catch. It seems that the bottom of the North Sea is fairly covered with multitudes of these fish, which served the islanders of that coast as both meat and bread. They dried and toasted them, and served them with their afternoon coffee, and you might look long for a better dish. I think of it often as being quite like Tvebak[13] slightly salted, only better to my youthful taste. Out along the river mouth was famous hunting for water-fowl. In the migrating season great flocks of duck alighted there, and geese and every other kind of game that flies. I can hear yet the cry of the sickle-billed curlew in those meadows. It prophesied rain, we said, and the promise was usually kept. When I was a big boy, the first telegraph line was built to the Old Town, and that autumn an odd thing happened. Morning after morning dozens of shore-birds were found dead under the wires. We thought first that the electric current had slain them as they roosted on the wires; but as it was apparent that some of them couldn’t roost that way, a better explanation was sought and found. They had been killed flying against the wires. It seems that they were strung just at the height at which they flew. It is clear to me that birds have some power of reasoning, for after a while we found no more dead. Evidently they had learned to fly higher, or lower perhaps.