She has very bright eyes and looks as keen and businesslike as the young woman.  She told us the other day she had forty grandchildren—­all the males, men and boys, sailors and fishermen and “mousses”—­many of the girls fishwives and the mothers married to fishermen or sailors.  I asked her why some of them hadn’t tried to do something else—­there were so many things people could do in these days to earn their living without leading such a rough life.  She was quite astonished at my suggestion—­replied that they had lived on the sea all their lives and never thought of doing anything else.  Her own husband had been a fisherman—­belonged to one of the Iceland boats—­went three or four times a year regularly—­didn’t come back one year—­no tidings ever came of ship or crew—­it was God’s will, and when his time came he had to go, whether in his bed or on his boat.  And she brought up all her sons to be sailors or fishermen, and when two were lost at sea, accepted that, too, as part of her lot, only said it was hard, sometimes, for the poor women when the winter storms came and the wind was howling and the waves thundering on the beach, and they thought of their men ("mon homme” she always called her husband when speaking of him), wet and cold, battling for their lives.  I talked to her often and the words of the old song,

   “But men must work and women must weep,
   Though storms be sudden, and waters deep,
   And the harbour bar be moaning,”

came back to me more than once, for the floating buoy at the end of the jetty makes a continuous dull melancholy sound when the sea is at all rough, and when it is foggy (the channel fogs come up very quickly) we hear fog horns all around us and quite distinctly the big sirene of Cap Gris Nez, which sends out its long wailing note over the sea.  It is very powerful and is heard at a long distance.

The shops on the quay are an unfailing source of interest to me.  I make a tour there every morning before I go down to the beach.  They have such a wonderful variety of things.  Shells of all sizes—­enormous pink ones like those I always remember standing on the mantelpiece in the nursery at home—­brought back by a sailor brother who used to tell us to put them to our ears and we would hear the noise of the sea—­and beautiful delicate little mother-of-pearl shells that are almost jewels—­wonderful frames, boxes, and pincushions, made of shells; big spoons, too, with a figure or a ship painted on them—­knives, penholders, paper-cutters and brooches, made out of the bones of big fish—­tassels of bright-coloured sea-weed, corals, vanilla beans—­curiously worked leather belts—­some roughly carved ivory crosses, umbrella handles, canes of every description, pipes, long gold earrings, parrots, little birds with bright-coloured feathers, monkeys—­an extraordinary collection.