boats on their
return after being out at sea. They all stood on the beach clamoring
like a flock of sea-gulls, and, as a boat's keel rasped the shingles,
rushed forward and seized it; and while the men in their sea clothes,
all dripping like huge Newfoundland dogs, jumped out in their heavy
boots and took each the way to their several houses, their stalwart
partners, hauling all together at the rope fastened to the boat, drew it
up beyond water-mark, and seized and sorted its freight of fish, and
stalked off each with her own basketful, with which she trudged up to
trade and chaffer with the "gude wives" of the town, and bring back to
the men the value of their work. It always seemed to me that these women
had about as equal a share of the labor of life as the most zealous
champion of the rights of their sex could desire.

I did not indulge in any more boating expeditions, but admired the sea
from the pier, and became familiar with all the spokes of the
fish-wife's family wheel; at any rate, enough to distinguish Jamie from
Sandy, and Willie from Johnnie, and Maggie from Jeanie, and Ailsie from
Lizzie, and was great friends with them all.

When I returned to Edinburgh, a theatrical star of the first magnitude,
I took a morning's holiday to drive down to Newhaven, in search of my
old ally, Mistress Sandie Flockhart. She no longer inhabited the little
detached cottage, and divers and sundry were the Flockhart "wives" that
I "speired at" through the unsavory street of Newhaven, before I found
the right one at last, on the third flat of a filthy house, where noise
and stench combined almost to knock me down, and where I could hardly
knock loud enough to make myself heard above the din within and without.
She opened the door of a room that looked as if it was running over with
live children, and confronted me with the unaltered aspect of her
comely, smiling face. But I had driven down from Edinburgh in all the
starlike splendor of a lilac silk dress and French crape bonnet, and my
dear fish-wife stared at me silently, with her mouth and gray eyes wide
open; only for a moment, however, for in the next she joyfully
exclaimed, "Ech, sirs! but it's yer ain sel come back again at last!"
Then seizing my hand, she added breathlessly, "I'se gotten anither ane,
and ye maun come in and see him;" so she dragged me bodily through and
over her surging progeny to a cradle, where, soothed by the strident
lullabies of its vociferating pred