Most of the vessels that had been fishing during the winter had been stripped of their winter sails, and now aboard these they were bending on the summer suits and slinging up what top spars had not already been sent up. For the vessels that had been laid up all winter and stripped of everything, they were getting out the gear from the lofts. Everywhere it was topmasts being sent up, sails being dragged out, stays swayed taut, halyards and sheets rove--an overhauling generally. On the railways--Burnham's, Parkhurst's, and Tarr's--were vessels having their bottoms scrubbed and painted and their topsides lined out. And they all looked so handsome and smelt so fine with their riggings being tarred, not with the smoky tar that people ashore put on house-roofs, but the fine rich-smelling tar that goes into vessels' rigging; and there was the black and dark sea-green paint for the sides, with the gold or yellow or sometimes red stripe to mark the run, and main and quarter rails being varnished. And the seine-boats! If there is anything afloat that sets more easily on the water than a seine-boat I never saw it, unless it might be a birch-bark canoe--and who'd want to be caught out in a blow in a canoe? The seine-boats all looked as natural as so many sea-gulls--thirty-six or thirty-eight feet long, green or blue bottoms to just above the waterline so that it would show, and above that all clear white except for the blue or red or yellow or green decorations that some skippers liked. And the seines that went with them were coming in wagons from the net and twine factory, tanned brown or tarred black and all ready to be hauled on to the vessels' decks or stowed in the holds below, until the fleet should be in among the mackerel to the south'ard--off Hatteras or Cape May or somewhere down that way. To feel all that and the rest of it--to walk to the tops of your shoes in pine chips in the spar yards, to measure the lengths of booms and gaffs for yourself if you weren't sure who were going to spread the big mainsails, to go up in the sail-lofts and see the sailmakers, bench after bench of them, making their needles and the long waxed threads fly through the canvas that it seemed a pity wasn't to stay so white forever--to see them spread the canvas out along the chalk lines on the varnished floor, fixing leach and luff ropes to them and putting the leather-bound cringles in, and putting them in too so they'd stay, for by and by men's lives would depend on the way they hung on--all that, railways, sail-lofts, vessels, boats, docks alive with men jumping to their work--skippers, crews, carpenters, riggers, lumpers, all thinking, talking, and, I suppose, dreaming of the season's work ahead--m-m--there was life for a man! Who'd want to work in a store after that? I stopped at Duncan's wharf and looked at Wesley Marrs's vessel, the Lucy Foster, and then the Colleen Bawn.