ecome
Venus Anadyomene herself, turned into a Scotch fish-wife of five and
thirty, or "thereawa." "Can you tell me of any one who will take me out
in a boat for a little while?" quoth I. She looked steadily at me for a
minute, and then answered laconically, "Ay, my man and boy shall gang
wi' ye." A few lusty screams brought her husband and son forth, and at
her bidding they got a boat ready, and, with me well covered with
sail-cloths, tarpaulins, and rough dreadnaughts of one sort and another,
rowed out from the shore into the turmoil of the sea. A very little of
the dancing I got now was delight enough for me, and, deadly sick, I
besought to be taken home again, when the matronly Brinhilda at the
cottage received me with open-throated peals of laughter, and then made
me sit down till I had conquered my qualms and was able to walk back to
Edinburgh. Before I went, she showed me a heap of her children, too many,
it seemed to me, to be counted; but as they lay in an inextricable mass
on the floor in an inner room, there may have seemed more arms and legs
forming the radii, of which a clump of curly heads was the center, than
there really were.

The husband was a comparatively small man, with dark eyes, hair, and
complexion; but her "boy," the eldest, who had come with him to take
care of me, was a fair-haired, fresh-faced young giant, of his mother's
strain, and, like her, looked as if he had come of the Northern Vikings,
or some of the Niebelungen Lied heroes.

When I went away, my fish-wife bade me come again in smooth weather, and
if her husband and son were at home they should take me out; and I gave
her my address, and begged her, when she came up to town with her fish,
to call at the house.

She was a splendid specimen of her tribe, climbing the steep Edinburgh
streets with bare white feet, the heavy fish-basket at her back hardly
stooping her broad shoulders, her florid face sheltered and softened in
spite of its massiveness into something like delicacy by the transparent
shadow of the white handkerchief tied hoodwise over her fair hair, and
her shrill sweet voice calling "Caller haddie!" all the way she went, in
the melancholy monotone that resounds through the thoroughfares of
Edinburgh--the only melodious street-cry (except the warning of the
Venetian gondoliers) that I ever heard.

I often went back to visit my middle-aged Christie Johnstone, and more
than once saw her and her fellow fish-women haul up the