noon
He liked the solitude of the tremendous , tumbling ocean ; the fresh , windy downs ; he liked to feel the gusty Trades flogging his face , and he would remain for hours watching the roll and plunge of the breakers with the silent , unreasoned enjoyment of a child . All at once he developed a passion for fishing . He would sit all day nearly motionless upon a point of rocks , his fish-line between his fingers , happy if he caught three perch in twelve hours . At noon he would retire to a bit of level turf around an angle of the shore and cook his fish , eating them without salt or knife or fork . He thrust a pointed stick down the mouth of the perch , and turned it slowly over the blaze . When the grease stopped dripping , he knew that it was done , and would devour it slowly and with tremendous relish , picking the bones clean , eating even the head . He remembered how often he used to do this sort of thing when he was a boy in the mountains of Placer County , before he became a car-boy at the mine .