The Followers of the Lord Author:John Mason Neale Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in fgolg THE TUNNY FISHERS. OU will promise, then, to take care of little Pietro, if I let him go with i ? You will promise it, Rocco ?" will, inde... more »ed, mother. There is no danger in the world." " Remember that your father cannot attend to him as a common sailor might do; you must be father and brother to him at once." "Well, I will try, mother," replied Rocco. "But the boats will not start for this half hour." So it was that Agata Gazani was talking to her eldest son, a tall, good-humoured lad, some fifteen or sixteen years old, with a bright blue eve, dark hair that curled all over hisforehead, and a complexion as brown as a berry, from the Sardinian sun, and the breezes of the Mediterranean. Their cottage stood just on the outskirts of Le Saline, one of the few places in Sardinia where the tunny fishery is still kept up. The father of Eocco was Rais, or commander of the boats; an office requiring, as you will see, great skill, and courage, and presence of mind, and experience. Rocco was being brought up to the same profession ; and little Pietro was eager to go with him, for it was the first mattanza—that is, slaughter of the tunnies—which he had ever seen. I must tell you that the same God, Who teaches the swallow and the nightingale to know their appointed time for coming into our own pleasant land, causes those great fish, the tunnies, to leave the Atlantic about the middle of April, and then, passing up the Mediterranean, to enter the Black Sea, and return about August. No man knows the reason of this visit, though thus it has always been since the times of the ancient Greeks; and hundreds of poor fishermen are made rich every year bythe taking of the tunnies. But there is some danger in the fishery, as you will presently hear; and therefore it was that...« less