The day burns on. Hundreds of vast fish are landed in the boats. The family have two tuna aboard as the sun slides into the waves. They go after their biggest fish. They locate (heir two gonfalons one after the other. The tuna hitched to them are tired now, and they bring them aboard. The last, which was the first harpooned, is so large Father has to borrow a friend's tackle-and-fall, and the friend, to get the fish into the boat.
The family go home through the long August afterglow on an ocean like the Field of the Cloth of Gold in Dickens' History of England, which is Peter's book of the month. They are down to the water's edge. Four monsters, head over one rail, tail over the other, weight them down. There is hardly room for the boys. But the four boys fit into the contours of the men, and they go happily into the dark, Peter falls asleep, standing up between Father and Uncle Cephus. But he wakes and sees (he great fish going aloft in the sputter of arc lights at the wharf, where they sell them at four cents a pound. ＄146 it is for an August day that will be like a bright dream all his life to Peter.
That night Peter eats a mahogany slab of that first fish of theirs. Bur Uncle Timothy doesn't eat any, either of the light or the dark steaks.
“Me?” says Uncle Timothy; “I'm not having any. Too rich for my blood. Thanks just the same. I'll stick to my bread-and-milk, I wouldn't dare. Oily?—say if I ate a hunk of that baby, I'd blow myself into kingdom come when I went to blow out my lamp tonight, I ain't hankering to die young.”
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