The lines are trailed astern of the boat as it sails up and down, where the mackerel are believed to be. When well on the feed they will bite, even at the pipe clay and bare hook, faster than they can be hauled inboard. River anglers and even some sea fishers are disposed to deny the amount of skill, alertness and knowledge which go to catching the greatest possible number of fish while they are up. It is often said that the mackerel allows itself to be caught as easily by a beginner as by an old hand. One or two mackerel may: mackerel don't. In hooking, as opposed to fishing fine with a rod, the sporting element is supplied by fish, not a fish; by numbers in a given time, not bend and break. The tackle brought to the sea by the superior angler, who thinks he knows more than those who have hooked mackerel for generations, is a wonder, delight, and irritation to professional fishermen: it is constructed in such robust ignorance of the habits, and manner of biting, of mackerel, and it ignores so obstinately the conditions of the sport. Likewise the fish ignore it.
[10] Undoubtedly, if the mackerel are only half on the feed, a fresh lask is better than any other bait, better than an equally brilliant salted lask. It is the shine of the bait at which the fish bite, as at a spinner, but probably the fresh lask leaves behind it in the water an odour or flavour of mackerel oil which keeps the shoal together and makes them follow the boat.
[11] The flexibility and expressiveness of dialect lies largely in its ability to change its verbal form and pronunciation from a speech very broad indeed to something approaching standard English. For example, "You'm a fool," is playful; "You'm a fule," less so. "You're a fool," asserts the fact without blame; while "Thee't a fule," or "Thee a't a fule!" would be spoken in temper, and the second is the more emphatic. The real differences between "I an't got nothing," "I an't got ort," and "I an't got nort,"—"Oo't?" "Casn'?" "Will 'ee?" and "Will you?"—"You'm not," "You ain't," "You bain't," and "Thee a'tn't,"—are hardly to be appreciated by those who speak only standard English. Thee and thou are used between intimates, as in French. Thee is usual from a mother to her children, but is disrespectful from children to their mother.
[12] On the moral aspect of cleanliness I have not touched. Miss M. Loane, a Queen's Nurse, in her remarkable book The Next Street but One, observes "Cleanliness has often seemed to me strangely far from godliness. Where the virtue is highly developed there is often not merely an actual but an absolute shrinkage in all sweet neighbourly charities. If an invalid's bedroom needs scrubbing and there is no money to pay for the service, or if a chronic sufferer's kitchen is in want of a 'thorough good do-out,' if two or three troublesome children have to be housed and fed during the critical days after an operation on father or mother, do I look for assistance from 'the cleanest woman in the street?' Alas, no; whether she be wife, widow, or spinster, I pass her by, careful not to tread on her pavement, much less her doorstep, and seek the happy-go-lucky person whose own premises would be better for more water and less grease, but from whose presence neither husband nor child ever hastens away."
[13] A spot found by getting an elm-tree on the cliffs in a line with a beech-tree up on land.