Deephaven by Sarah Orne Jewett — Read

One of the chief pleasures in Deephaven was our housekeeping. Going to / market was apt to use up a whole morning, especially if we went to the / fish-houses. We depended somewhat upon supplies from Boston, but / sometimes we used to chase a butcher who took a drive in his old / canvas-topped cart when he felt like it, and as for fish, there were / always enough to be caught, even if we could not buy any. Our / acquaintances would often ask if we had anything for dinner that day, / and would kindly suggest that somebody had been boiling lobsters, or / that a boat had just come in with some nice mackerel, or that somebody / over on the Ridge was calculating to kill a lamb, and we had better / speak for a quarter in good season. I am afraid we were looked upon as / being in danger of becoming epicures, which we certainly are not, and we / undoubtedly roused a great deal of interest because we used to eat / mushrooms, which grew in the suburbs of the town in wild luxuriance.

One morning Maggie told us that there was nothing in the house for / dinner, and, taking an early start, we went at once down to the store to / ask if the butcher had been seen, but finding that he had gone out / deep-sea fishing for two days, and that when he came back he had planned / to kill a veal, we left word for a sufficient piece of the doomed animal / to be set apart for our family, and strolled down to the shore to see if / we could find some mackerel; but there was not a fisherman in sight, and / after going to all the fish-houses we concluded that we had better / provide for ourselves. We had not brought our own lines, but we knew / where Danny kept his, and after finding a basket of suitable size, and / taking some clams from Danny's bait-tub, we went over to the hull of an / old schooner which was going to pieces alongside one of the ruined / wharves. We looked down the hatchway into the hold, and could see the / flounders and sculpin swimming about lazily, and once in a while a / little pollock scooted down among them impertinently and then / disappeared. "There is that same big flounder that we saw day before / yesterday," said I. "I know him because one of his fins is half gone. I / don't believe he can get out, for the hole in the side of the schooner / isn't very wide, and it is higher up than flounders ever swim. Perhaps / he came in when he was young, and was too lazy to go out until he was so / large he couldn't. Flounders always look so lazy, and as if they thought / a great deal of themselves."