Harper's Young People, November 1, 1881 / An Illustrated Weekly

BEN BUTTLES'S GREAT CATCH.—Drawn by M. J. Burns.

Every boy realizes the fascination of fishing, even if he gets nothing but bites—mosquito bites at that. It is the anticipation of what one may catch which heightens the every charm of the sport itself.
But taking flounders from the wharf, or trout in the mill-stream, is quite a different thing from cod or pollock fishing in thirty fathoms of green sea. The one may sometimes be the pursuit of pleasure under difficulties; the other is generally the pursuit of business under danger. So at least most of you would have said had you seen the widow Buttles's Ben at the time when my story begins.
He was standing upright in a fourteen-foot dory, and I may add that the dory, generally speaking, was also standing upright, which is not so surprising, for, in the first place, the wind was blowing half a gale; in the second place, Ben's boat was anchored, with fifty fathom of scope near the Breaking Shoals, and by chart Breaking Shoals bear E.N.E. from Covert Point, distance three and a quarter miles, with nothing nearer than Europe to check the force of the Atlantic billows.
No idea it was so late, muttered Ben, a little anxiously, as he began to reel up one of the lines. Looks baddish to wind'ard, and the sea is getting up, he added, with a rapid glance from the cloud-bank behind which the sun had set to the heaving ocean about him. A landsman would have supposed that the sea had already got up. How Ben kept his balance so easily, as the dory ran on the slopes of the great waves, which slipped from under its flat bottom with such startling suddenness, would seem marvellous to any one except a person living alongshore. But Ben Buttles was perfectly at home in his dory; for in the little sea-board village of Covert, whose distant lights were just visible through the gathering darkness, every man owned some kind of a boat, while every other man was Cap'n or Skipper. Hence the most that troubled Ben was the thought that he had been so taken up with fishing as to forget that the sun had begun to set, the tide to ebb, and a gale to rise.