refreshed the mind, just as it is refreshed by considering the
deliberate ways of harmless animals.

Towards eleven in the morning Peggy would be seated in her warm kitchen,
beside a flat basket in which mysterious coils of brown twine wound
round and round. The brown twine had tied to it long lines of horse-hair
snoods with sharp white hooks lashed on by slips of waxed thread. Peggy
baited one after another of these hooks and laid them dexterously so
that the line might be shot overboard without entanglement. You might
sit down in the sanded kitchen to talk to the good woman if you were not
nice about fishy odours. If you led on to such subjects, she would bring
out her store of ghostly stories: how a dead lady walked in the
shrubberies by the tower after the squire's sons murdered her lover; and
how the old clock in the tower had a queer light travelling over its
face on one day of the year. Or she would gossip about the folks in the
place; telling you how poor Jemmy had lost money, and how old Adam had
got a rare stocking, and him meeting the priest every day like a poor
man. You might smoke as much as you liked in Peggy's kitchen; and for
various reasons it was just as well to keep smoking: the sanitary
principles of Dr. Richardson are not known in the villages on the coast.
Peggy herself did not smoke, because it was not considered right for
women to use tobacco until they were past the age of sixty-five. After
that they had their weekly allowance with the groceries. In the evenings
of bright days you saw Peggy at her best. When the dusk fell, and the
level sands shone with a deep smooth gloss, you would see strange
figures bowing with rhythmic motions. These figures were those of women.
All the women of the village turn out on the sand to hunt for sand-eels.
To catch a sand-eel requires long practice. You take two iron hooks, and
work them down deep in the sand when the tide has just gone. With quick
but steady movements, you make a series of deep "criss-crosses;" and