When the mackerel visit the coast, and come near enough to be taken in a draw-net, every villager who owns a share (usually a tenth) in a fishing-boat throws down his spade or whatever implement he happens to have in his hand at the moment, and hurries away to the beach to take his share in the fascinating task.  At four o’clock one morning a youth, who had been down to the sea to watch, came running into the village uttering loud cries which were like excited yells—­a sound to rouse the deepest sleeper.  The mackerel had come!  For the rest of the day there was a pretty kind of straggling procession of those who went and came between the beach and the village—­men in blue cotton shirts, blue jerseys, blue jackets, and women in grey gowns and big white sun-bonnets.  During the latter part of the day the proceedings were peculiarly interesting to me, a looker-on with no share in any one of the boats, owing to the catches being composed chiefly of jelly-fish.  Some sympathy was felt for the toilers who strained their muscles again and again only to be mocked in the end; still, a draught of jelly-fish was more to my taste than one of mackerel.  The great weight of a catch of this kind when the net was full was almost too much for the ten or twelve men engaged in drawing it up; then (to the sound of deep curses from those of the men who were not religious) the net would be opened and the great crystalline hemispheres, hyaline blue and delicate salmon-pink in colour, would slide back into the water.  Such rare and exquisite colours have these great glassy flowers of ocean that to see them was a feast; and every time a net was hauled up my prayer—­which I was careful not to repeat aloud—­was, Heaven send another big draught of jelly-fish!

The sun, sinking over the hills towards Swyre and Bridport, turned crimson before it touched the horizon.  The sky became luminous; the yellow Chesil Bank, stretching long leagues away, and the hills behind it, changed their colours to violet.  The rough sea near the beach glittered like gold; the deep green water, flecked with foam, was mingled with fire; the one boat that remained on it, tossing up and down near the beach, was like a boat of ebony in a glittering fiery sea.  A dozen men were drawing up the last net; but when they gathered round to see what they had taken—­mackerel or jelly-fish—­I cared no longer to look with them.  That sudden, wonderful glory which had fallen on the earth and sea had smitten me as well and changed me; and I was like some needy homeless tramp who has found a shilling piece, and, even while he is gloating over it, all at once sees a great treasure before him—­glittering gold in heaps, and all rarest sparkling gems, more than he can gather up.

But it is a poor simile.  No treasures in gold and gems, though heaped waist-high all about, could produce in the greediest man, hungry for earthly pleasures, a delight, a rapture, equal to mine.  For this joy was of another and higher order and very rare, and was a sense of lightness and freedom from all trammels as if the body had become air, essence, energy, or soul, and of union with all visible nature, one with sea and land and the entire vast overarching sky.