The Toilers of the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

coal. A stroller about town can read a variety of other notices: “A fine bull to be hired out here, as in the past.”—“Highest prices given for rags, lead, glass and bones.”—“For sale, new kidney potatoes of the finest quality.”—“For sale, pea stakes, some tons of oats for chaff, a complete set of English-style doors for a drawing room and a fat pig. Mon Plaisir farm, St. James’s.”—“For sale, good hay, recently threshed, yellow carrots by the hundred, and a good French syringe. Apply to the Moulin de l’Échelle, St. Andrew’s.”—“It is forbidden to dress fish or deposit refuse.”—“For sale, a she-ass in milk.” And so on, and so on.

IX
    JERSEY, ALDERNEY, SARK
    The Channel Islands are fragments of France that have fallen into the sea and been picked up by England. Hence their complex nationality. The people of Jersey and Guernsey are certainly not English against their will, but they are also French without knowing it. If they do know it, they make a point of forgetting it. Some indication of this is given by the French they speak. The archipelago consists of four islands— two large ones, Jersey and Guernsey, and two small ones, Alderney and Sark—together with various islets: Ortach, the Casquets, Herm, Jethou, and so on. The names of the islets and reefs in this old Gaul frequently contain the term
hou.
Alderney has Burhou, Sark has Brecqhou, Guernsey has Lihou and Jethou, Jersey has Les Écrehou, Granville has Le Pirhou. There are La Hougue Point, La Hougue Bie, La Hougue des Pommiers, the Houmets, etc. There are the island of Chousey, the Chouas reef, etc. This remarkable radical of the primitive language of the region,
hou,
is found everywhere: in the words
houle
(entrance to a rabbit’s burrow),
huée
(booing),
hure
(promontory),
hourque
(a Dutch cargo vessel),
houre
(an old word for scaffold),
houx
(holly),
houperon
(shark),
hurlement
(howling),
hulotte
(brown owl), and chouette (screech owl), from which is derived Chouan, 18 etc.; and it can be detected in two words that express the indefinite,
unda
and
unde.
It is also found in two words expressing doubt, ou and où. 19
    Sark is half the size of Alderney, Alderney is a quarter the size of Guernsey, and Guernsey is two-thirds the size of Jersey. The whole of the island of Jersey is exactly the same size as the city of London. It would take twenty-seven hundred Jerseys to make up the area of France. According to the calculations of Charassin, an excellent practical agronomist, France, if it were as well cultivated as Jersey, could feed a population of 270 million—the whole of Europe. Of the four islands Sark, the smallest, is the most beautiful; Jersey, the largest, is the prettiest; and Guernsey, both wild and smiling, has the qualities of both. Sark has a silver mine that is not worked because it yields so little. Jersey has fifty-six thousand inhabitants, Guernsey thirty thousand, Alderney forty-five hundred, Sark six hundred, Lihou one. The distance between these islands, between Alderney and Guernsey and between Guernsey and Jersey, is the stride of a seven-league boot. The arm of the sea between Guernsey and Herm is called the Little Russel, that between Herm and Sark the Great Russel. The nearest point in France is Cape Flamanville. On Guernsey you can hear the cannon of Cherbourg; in Cherbourg you can hear the thunder of Guernsey. The storms in the archipelago of the Channel, as we have said, are terrible. Archipelagos are abodes of the winds. Between the various islands there is a corridor that acts as a bellows—a law that is bad for the sea and good for the land. The wind carries away miasmas and brings about shipwrecks. This law applies to the Channel Islands as it does to other archipelagos. Cholera has spared Jersey and Guernsey; but there was such a violent epidemic on Guernsey in the Middle Ages that the bailiff