“’Taint no good, Miss, after all,” Mrs. Tregennis called out gloomily as they passed the kitchen door.
“Oh, Mrs. Tregennis, why? I’m so sorry! Has the wind changed again?”
“Oh, not the fishin’, Miss, but the chewin’,” she hastened to explain. “Tom and Tommy was both tryin’ hard but by the time they’d chewed less an’ twenty chews they didn’t ’ave nothin’ left.”
“We was just chewin’ on nothin’,” added Tregennis, who was drying his face on the runnerin’ towel.
“T’ad all slippen down,” volunteered Tommy, looking up from lacing his boots.
Miss Margaret looked at them sorrowfully. “There, you see,” she declaimed, “it is just the universal finding. You will not allow yourselves to be improved! You do not wish to be nourished! You will not chew! Thus you waste half, nay, more than half, of the food you eat.”
Then, relapsing into her normal manner, “Perhaps I’m not quite justified in speaking,” she admitted, “for I know quite definitely I couldn’t chew forty-five times myself, and I haven’t been as enterprising as you, for I’ve never even tried.”
Tregennis picked up the basket of food that had led to the discussion, and Tommy and the ladies accompanied him to the quay where he boarded the “Light of Home.”
Sitting in the sunshine on the rocks, Tommy’s Ladies watched the fishing boats tack across to Polderry then veer slowly round and sail in a south-westerly direction. From Tregennis they knew that the fleet was making for Mevagissey, where they would shoot their nets and hope to get a good catch for baiting the boulters. In those waters they thought that the smaller fish, pollock, pilchards (not fit, at this time of the year, for food), herring and whiting would be plentiful.
To those who do not know, boulter-fishing seems a fairly easy occupation. The boats sail away with something trawling after them on the floor of the sea, and the fish is caught!