I suggested, quoting the Cornish proverb.
He smiled, and replied, “Well, et’s meant for pelchurs, but et’s true enuf for salmin baas.”
Somewhat cheered by the old fellow’s words, I set out after an early lunch for Roarer Point, as it is called, taking my fishing-tackle with me. The going was heavy, for the sand, beloved of the launce, is loose; moreover the sun beat down mercilessly; but there was some compensation in the scene.
I do not believe the man lives who could have been blind to the beauty of that sea. In an old Eastern poem a Persian is represented as beholding from the desert’s edge a boundless plain of turquoise. The Atlantic on which I looked might have been such a plain, except for the way it heaved; but it was on the breaking wave that the eye dwelt, and found relief from the glare of the beach. How deliciously cool the ever-rising, ever-breaking walls of translucent water looked in contrast with the glowing sands over which the air shimmered and quivered. Overhead a gull floated lazily, its snowy plumage showing finely against the blue vault; and just after I crossed the little stream that trickles down from Vellandreath, a butterfly—I believe it was a red admiral—greatly daring, flitted seaward, and passed out of my sight.
At last I reached the little headland, scrambled over the burning rocks, and gained its extreme point. The water below me was some ten or twelve feet deep, and being outside the line of the breakers, its surface, except when a breath of wind caught it, was without a ripple, and the eye could search every foot of the bottom near the rocks, and for some distance beyond. When I had baited the hook, I threw the line into the water towards the Gwenvor sands, where I could see the approach of any bass that might be coasting towards Sennen Cove, and it might be, watch it swallow the lure, for —
“The pleasant’st angling, is to see the fish
Cut with his golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait.”
Besides the hand-line I had a rod with me, and on this I had rigged a spinning-flight and launce, intending, when the tide rose about a foot higher, to make a few casts from the point.
A seaweed, favourite food of the shy mullet, grew on two big boulders that lay half-buried in the white sand in the water below me. Though semi-transparent it was clearly visible when the rippled surface smoothed. Presently a small crab, as if fearful of being seen, scuttled across the sandy strait between the rocks where rested my tempting bait of ray’s liver.