Another day he found Mrs Dean’s reticule, and caught a great many shrimps as well.
Then the tide did not serve for several days, and he had to wait, shaking his head and telling Mrs Miggles he was afraid the sand would have covered everything.
“Then give it up,” said Mrs Miggles, who was trying to sew with the little girl in her lap, but was prevented by the tiny thing making dashes at her broad-brimmed silver spectacles, which it kept taking off and flourishing in one little plump hand.
“Well done, little ’un,” cried the fisherman, grinning. “No, missus, I don’t like being beat.”
He went off, looking very serious, with his net over one shoulder, the creel over the other, and after going to and fro patiently waist and often breast deep, he was successful in finding Cora Dean’s reticule, with its purse and cut-glass bottle; and that night he went home amply rewarded, Cora having been very generous, and Mrs Dean saying several times over that she wouldn’t have believed that a great rough man like that would have been so honest.
“I declare, Betsy, he’s just like a man in a play—the good man who finds the treasure and gives it up. Why, he might have kep’ your puss, and my puss too, and nobody been a bit the wiser.”
That was all that was missing; but every day for a week, during the times that the tide was low, Fisherman Dick was busy, pushing his shrimping-net before him, and stopping every now and then to raise it, throw out the rubbish, and transfer the few shrimps he caught to his creel.
It was not a good place for shrimping—it was too deep; but he kept on with his laborious task, wading out as far as ever he could go; and more than one of his fellow-mermen grinned at his empty creel.
“Why don’t you try the shallows, Dick?” said one of the blue-jerseyed fellows, who seemed to be trying to grow a hump on his back by leaning over the rail at the edge of the cliff.
“’Cause I like to try the deeps,” growled Fisherman Dick.