I went in for a swim, and as I was playing about in the sunlit water the first human messenger of the morning came past me—a fisherman in a tooting, panting motor-boat, dragging fishing-nets after him. He gave me greeting in the water.
Fishing is good here—as a trade. Every day many tons of carp are unloaded. The fish are caught in gill-nets—nets with a mesh from which the fishes are unable to extricate themselves, their gills getting caught. The nets are framed on stakes, floated by corks and steadied by leads. The fishermen leave them standing two or three days, and when the fish are wearied out or dead they haul them in.
This very hot day I marched to an accompaniment of the thunder of the dock-works, and reached Sandusky,—a very large industrial port, the junction of three railways, not a place of much wealth, its population at least half foreign.
I had a shave at a negro barber's, and chatted with the darkie as he brandished the razor.
After the war he and his folks had come north and settled in Michigan. He sent all his children to college. One was earning a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month as music-mistress in Washington.
"They treat you better up here than in the south?" said I.
"Why, yes!"
"And in London better still."
"Oh, I know. My father went to London. He stayed at a big hotel, and there turned up three Southerners. They went up to the hotel-keeper and said, 'Look hyar, that coloured feller 'll have to go; we cahn stay here with him!' And the hotel-keeper said, 'If he don't please you, you go; we won't keep you back.'"
"Very affecting," said I.