unknown upon the Stock Exchange, because
they are never in any market except Billingsgate
market; a joint-stock company that may not be
peculiar to Whitstable, but is peculiar, so it
seems, to all happy fishing-grounds, where
oysters are cultivated, and the capricious bounty
of sea-faring nature is reduced to a mathematical
certainty by the application of capital and
laborious care. It was not formed by any active
and calculating company-maker, whose office is
in the city of London, whose profit is a percentage
upon all capital raised, and whose ambition
is a secretarial chair. It came together, in the
dim old times, as a family compact, and a family
compact it still remains. Its three hundred and
forty odd members are all Whitstable men, or
Whitstable widows and children. The stranger
is never admitted to the rights and profits of a
dredging-freeman, though the strange woman
may be brought, by marriage, into the oyster
tents, and may rear up sons who shall go forth
and fish. The male infant is born, a young
shareholder, in one of the low, pitch-black wooden
houses on the beach; he is nursed to the tune
of an oyster-dredging lullaby, to the howling of
the wind, to the hissing of the surge. He
staggers into the back parlour as soon as he can
walk, and finds it a Robinson Crusoe's store-
room, filled with canvas, coils of rope, old
oars, nails, paint-pots, and parts of ships. He
tumbles out of a door at the end, and down some
steps, on to the pebbly shore, where he plays on
the border of his happy fishing-ground, or
clambers into a boat bearing his father's name,
which lies high up on the beach, half filled with
the skins of dead star-fish, with cockle-shells, and
muddy crabs. As he grows older, he sees nothing
to wonder at if a wooden staircase comes down
from the top rooms of his father's house at the
exterior of the side wall; and he thinks an old
figure-head of Minerva, swept ashore, perhaps,
from the wreck of some collier, an ornament for
a parapet, superior to any statue that was ever
hewn out of stone. His first budding
geographical idea is that Billingsgate is the chief
city of the world; as that is the only part of the
great metropolis which comes into immediate
and constant contact with his native town. He
thinks that the handkerchief which his sister
wears over her head and shoulders in summer,
like a monk's cowl, or the shawl which she wears,
for greater warmth, in the same way, in winter,
the most elegant head-dress that was ever
planned. The fact that Canterbury, a cathedral
city, about seven miles off, has never adopted this
head-dress, is nothing to him, for he knows that
Whitstable men are perfect in matters of fish,
and he gallantly considers that Whitstable
women must consequently be perfect in matters
of taste. He looks upon a crowd of fifty blue-
woollen-shirtcd, heavy booted, oilskin-capped
free-dredgers, standing in the Whitstable High
street (the one main street of the town), as
something which a place called Cheapside has never
yet matched for noise and bustle, even on its
most busy days. He is aware that the South-
Eastern Railway has long since joined his native
town to London, and that the North Kent Railway,
with its continuations, has also advanced to
within a single stage. As the produce, however,
of his happy fishing-ground is never landed at
all, being shipped in his old, round, soppy
market hoys that are anchored in the bay,
and conveyed to market direct by water
(the cheapest way), he is not brought much in
communication with the iron road, and he leaves
it to the harbour traffic in coals and stone.

The free-dredger is thoroughly independent,
not given to touch his hat to lord or squire; and
if he does pay any mark of respect to the Duke
of Cumberland, it is only as the sign of the
dredgers' public-house, where the profits of the
free company of oyster fishers are divided and
paid. At fourteen years of age he may look with
hope towards this old smoky tavern, and may
enter as a fisherman's apprentice, to see his
master paid; but at twenty-one he comes into
his full birthright, his share in the myriads of
oysters he has so long been thinking about, with
all the claims and privileges that belong to the
free-fishing state. He is then permitted to
attend the "Water-Court" on the second Thursday
in July. Here all the dredgers meet and
vote by ballot, revise the by-laws, appoint the
nine watchmen with three watching boats, the
foreman of the ground, with his deputy, and
twelve jurymen are chosen as the board of
management for the year.

On this great day the whole town of
Whitstable is hung with flags; and the sound
of festivity is heard in the two principal
taverns, and in the many small wooden drink-
shops that are scattered along the shore. The
inhabitants, who have long brooded over the
oyster in the privacy of their homes, come
forward now, and sacrifice publicly in its honour
and praise. The young freemen are led into
flirtations with maidens who are outside the
incorporated dredgers' exclusive pale, and young
brides are soon brought into the huts of the
faithful, to gladden the hearts of the old freemen
with the prospect of the company being
preserved from decay. If a free-dredger dies
without male issue, then his share becomes
engulphed in the common stock, but his widow
receives a certain reduced payment out of each
day's fishing profits, up to the time of her death.
The aged, infirm, and superannuated, about one
fifth, are provided for in the same way, as well
as those who are compelled, by temporary illness,
to stop on shore. No one that has once been
connected with the happy fishing-grounds is ever
found begging for a loaf of bread.

The industrious little fleet consists of about
eighty fishing-smacks, and fourteen market-hoys.
The hoys are, of course, occupied in going to and
coming from Billingsgate, but the fishing-boats
are always moored in the bay, opposite the free
dredging settlement of the town. During three
days of the week these floating representatives
of the happy fishers (each one named after its
chief master, or the head of the family to which
it belongs) are employed with the happy fishers
themselves in what is called "dredging for