midnight
There was the tarpaulin , the baize shirt , the oilcloth trousers and seven-league boots , and there my own features , but so reddened with sunburn and sea-breezes that methought I had another face , and on other shoulders too . The seagulls and the loons and I had now all one trade : we skimmed the crested waves and sought our prey beneath them , the man with as keen enjoyment as the birds . Always when the east grew purple I launched my dory , my little flat-bottomed skiff , and rowed cross-handed to Point Ledge , the Middle Ledge , or perhaps beyond Egg Rock ; often , too , did I anchor off Dread Ledge -- a spot of peril to ships unpiloted -- and sometimes spread an adventurous sail and tracked across the bay to South Shore , casting my lines in sight of Scituate . Ere nightfall I hauled my skiff high and dry on the beach , laden with red rock-cod or the white-bellied ones of deep water , haddock bearing the black marks of St. Peter 's fingers near the gills , the long-bearded hake whose liver holds oil enough for a midnight lamp , and now and then a mighty halibut with a back broad as my boat . In the autumn I toled and caught those lovely fish the mackerel . When the wind was high , when the whale-boats anchored off the Point nodded their slender masts at each other and the dories pitched and tossed in the surf , when Nahant Beach was thundering three miles off and the spray broke a hundred feet in the air round the distant base of Egg Rock , when the brimful and boisterous sea threatened to tumble over the street of our village , -- then I made a holiday on shore . Many such a day did I sit snugly in Mr. Bartlett 's store , attentive to the yarns of Uncle Parker -- uncle to the whole village by right of seniority , but of Southern blood , with no kindred in New England .