The crow perceives that the houses in the
market-place are old, and have a character of
their own; also, that the fish-market displays
on its shields the half fishes, half lions, which
are the heraldic glory of Yarmouth. The
Fisherman's Hospital, a low, quadrangular building,
with curious gables, dates back to the last
year of William of Orange. A carved ship,
tossed ceaselessly on stormy waves, is placed
over an inner doorway; and a large statue of
Charity guards a contribution-box in the middle
of the court. No ancient mariner is admitted
within this tranquil precinct until he has battled
the storms and waves of this troublesome world
three score years.

The four rustling avenues of lime-trees,
delicious when in blossom, lead to the old priory
church of St. Nicholas, the great saint of the
Norfolk fishermen. The enormous building,
which will hold six thousand if tightly and
professionally packed, is the great composite of
many pious ages. In 1338 the bachelors of
Yarmouth began to build an aisle in this church,
but were stayed by a plague. After that, it
boasted of seventeen chapels and the right of
sanctuary. It has known various desecrations.
For more than three hundred years the ignoble
corporation picked up all the brasses and melted
them into weights. Still worse, a little later, all
the grave-stones were drawn, like so many teeth,
and shamefully sent to Newcastle to be shaped
into grindstones. During the Puritan period
three congregations met at the same time in
this enormous church. The partitions dividing
the three enclosures were only finally removed
about twenty years ago.

After the "Ballast Keel," with its fourteenth-
century arch and Jacobean ceiling—the ruins of
the Franciscan friary in the road leading to
Gaol-street – and the old house with herring-
bone masonry in George and Dragon-row—the
most remarkable bit of antiquity in Yarmouth,
is Mr. Palmer's house on the quay, built 1596;
the date appears on a chimney-piece carving.
This house once belonged to John Carter, a
bailiff of Yarmouth in the parliamentary times.
Cromwell often visited him, and his son married
Mary Ireton, daughter of the stern general.
Tradition says that in this house was held the
final consultation of the parliamentary leaders,
at which they decided upon the death of the
king; that the principal Puritan officers
assembled in the oak-pannelled drawing-room
up-stairs for privacy; and that it was strictly
commanded that no person should come near
the room except one man appointed to attend.
The dinner (tradition adds) was ordered at four
o'clock, and was put off from time to time till
past eleven at night: when the council came
down to a very short repast, and immediately
all set off post, some for London, and some
for the quarters of the army.

Whatever wind blows, blows hard here, and
the friendly lights of Caistor and Gorleston are
too often powerless to save the driven vessel.
In 1692 out of two hundred sail of those colliers
which always make Yarmouth their favourite
roadstead on their way from Newcastle, one
hundred and forty were battered to pieces on
the Yare shoals. In May, 1860, upwards of two
hundred fishermen were lost here. Nor, in
mentioning real Yarmouth wrecks, must we forget
the novelist's or the poet's wrecks. It was off
this place that Robinson Crusoe got into
trouble; here, too, a certain person named
Steerforth was overtaken by his destiny. Indeed,
the harbour planned by Joas Johnson, a
Dutchman, in 1567, the south pier (two thousand feet
long, and built on oak trunks), the leafy
Commercial quay, the south quay, improved by Sir
John Rennie, and still more than all these, the
Britannia jetty (which cost five thousand
pounds), recals to the crow other passages of
David Copperfield's Yarmouth career, as, for
example, his picture of the fishermen's quarter.
"I smelt the fish, and pitch, and tar, and oakum,
and saw the sailors walking about, and the carts
jingling up and down over the stony lanes,
bestrewn with bits of chip and little hillocks of
sand; past gasworks, ropewalks, boat-builders'
yards, shipwrights' yards, shipbreaker's yards,
riggers' lofts, smiths' forges, and a great litter
of such places, until we came out upon a dull
waste and desolate flat." In this quarter tarry
palings are hung with blackish brown nets, and
tar-coloured sails are everywhere being dried or
patched, rolled up, or unfolded. Here are herring
yawls, and mackerel boats, and those sturdy
cobles that come from Whitby and Scarborough,
bringing periwinkles and pickled mushrooms.
Here, too, are the decked boats that brave the
wolfish gales of the North Sea, and that used
in old times even to defy the crushing ice floes
of Greenland, in search of the whale.

Herrings are not alone the arms; they are the
very legs of Yarmouth. The town lives on them,
and stands by them. In 1798 Yarmouth had only
sixteen fishing boats, Lowestoft twenty-four,
and the Yorkshire men forty. In 1833 there
were one hundred Norfolk boats (chiefly
Yarmouth) to the forty or fifty of Yorkshire, the
whole employing a capital of two hundred and
fifty thousand pounds. In these present times,
a recent able writer says, there are two hundred
Yarmouth boats and forty Yorkshire and Sussex
cobles, catching every season six or seven score
million herrings, of the value of two hundred
thousand pounds. The mackerel fishing employs
one hundred boats and fourteen hundred men
and women. Every mackerel lugger costs seven
or eight hundred pounds, and carries eighty or
a hundred nets, each twenty yards long by eight
and a half broad. Every herring boat is worth
from six hundred to a thousand pounds. It is
calculated that half a million of money is, in one
way or other, invested at Yarmouth in reaping
the fish harvest. The herring harvest
commences at the end of September, and the
glittering millions of over population with
which the North Sea then teems are dragged
out for ten consecutive weeks. A recent
topographical traveller has collected with patient
care and skill some curious close-pressed facts
on the subject of Yarmouth's ceaseless
industry. On those rough October nights, when
the sands froth and boil crimson, in the slant