"Let me sit here a while."
"As long as you sit."
She went to a cupboard and took from it a big ball of strong linen thread. From the table she caught up a small board. Wrapping the thread twice around the board, she knotted it. Slipping the thread from the board, she hung the loop she had made on a wooden peg and made a new loop. Her hands flew so swiftly that in a few moments she had seventeen of the meshes, all joined together.
"What are you doing?" Ramsay inquired interestedly.
"Making a gill net," she explained. "It was ordered by Baptiste LeClair, a fisherman, and is to have a four and a half-inch mesh. So we use a mesh board that is exactly two and a quarter inches wide and wrap the thread twice around. Now I have seventeen. See?"
"I see."
She strung the seventeen meshes on a wooden rod, placed two chairs far enough apart so that the meshes stretched, tied the rod to them and began knitting on the net she had started. "The net is to be seventeen meshes, or seventy-six and one-half inches, wide. Now I lengthen it."
Under the boy's interested eyes the gill net grew swiftly, and as it lengthened she wrapped it around the rod. Ramsay watched every move. "How long will it be?" he queried.
"One net," she told him, "is about two hundred and fifty feet long. But usually several are tied together to form a box of nets. A box is about fourteen hundred feet."
"Isn't that a lot?"