The fishermen continued to drag their net, but caught other fishes instead of _giancketti_.

But while it lasted the plenty of them was prodigious.
All Sestri was eating them, as all Douarnenez ate sardines in the old days.

When the net with its sparkling cargo was dragged up on the sand and the contents were being shovelled into huge baskets to be carried up into the town, the men would take up handfuls of them, fresh, and I suppose still living, from the sea, and plunging their bearded mouths in them, eat them up by hundreds.

The children too, irrepressibly thronging round the net, would pick from its meshes the fishes which adhered to them and eat them, as more inland rising generations eat blackberries.

I did not try the experiment of eating them thus, as one eats oysters, but I can testify that, crisply fried, and eaten with brown bread and butter and lemon juice, they were remarkably good.
Fortified by the excellent example of Sir Francis Doyle, who in his extremely amusing volume of _Reminiscences_ gives as a reason for disregarding the claims of chronology in the composition of it, the chances that he might forget the matter he had In his mind if he did not book it at once, I have ventured for the same reason to do the same thing here.