Beneath us, to the left hand, is the quay-pool, now lying dry, in
which a dozen trawlers are lopping over on their sides, their red
sails drying in the sun, the tails of the trawls hauled up to the
topmast heads; while the more handy of their owners are getting on
board by ladders, to pack away the said red sails; for it will blow
to night. In the long furrows which their keels have left, and in the
shallow muddy pools, lie innumerable fragments of exenterated maids
(not human ones, pitiful reader, but belonging to the order Pisces,
and the family Raia), and some twenty non-exenterated ray-dogs and
picked dogs (Anglice, dog-fish), together with a fine basking shark,
at least nine feet long, out of which the kneeling Mr. George Thomas,
clothed in pilot cloth patches of every hue, bright scarlet, blue and
brown (not to mention a large square of white canvas which has been
let into that part of his trousers which is now uppermost), is
dissecting the liver for the purpose of greasing his "sheaves" with
the fragrant oil thereof. The pools in general are bedded with black
mud, and creamed over with oily flakes which may proceed from the tar
on the vessels' sides, and may also from "decomposing animal matter,"
as we euphemise it now-a-days. The hot pebbles, at high-tide
mark,--crowned with a long black row of herring and mackerel boats,
laid up in ordinary for the present--are beautifully variegated with
mackerels' heads, gurnets' fins, old hag, lobworm, and mussel-baits,
and the inwards of a whole ichthyological museum; save at one spot
where the Cloaca maxima and Port Esquiline of Aberalva town (small
enough, considering the place holds fifteen hundred souls) murmurs
from beneath a grey stone arch toward the sea, not unfraught with dead
rats and cats, who, their ancient feud forgotten, combine lovingly at
last in increasing the health of the blue-trousered urchins who are
sailing upon that Acherontic stream bits of board with a feather stuck