To Leeward by F. Marion Crawford — Read

From morning till night, under the broiling sun of August, a wretched-looking boat plied slowly along the rocks in the neighbourhood of the Carantoni landing. It was a miserable old tub, big enough to hold three or four people at the most, and the solitary individual to whom it seemed to belong propelled it slowly about with a pair of old green oars. Now and then he would paddle under the shadow of the cliffs and put down a line, angling for a stray mackerel or mullet, and sometimes catching even one of those sharp-finned red fellows that the Neapolitan fishermen called "cardinals. " He did not seem to care much whether he caught anything or not, but he apparently loved that particular part of the coast, for he was never seen anywhere else. A big, shabby man, in rough clothes, with bright blue eyes, and a half-grown, blue-black beard, -- Julius Batiscombe as a fisherman, -- brown as a berry, and growing rough-fisted from constant handling of oars and lines and nets.

No one took any notice of him as he pottered about in his tub. The watermen, who passed and repassed, knew him as the crazy Englishman who found it amusing to bake himself all day in the sun for the sake of catching some wretched fish that he could buy in the market for half the trouble. What did they care? They never fished there themselves, because there were no fish, -- a very good and simple reason, -- and if a foolish foreigner chose to register an old boat at the little fishing harbour close by, and pay ten francs for the privilege, it was not their business. Neapolitans and their congeners do not care much for anything foreigners do, unless it happens to bring them money.