The average artist is a being who is quite unable to recognise architectural merit.  He sees everything to please him if the background of his group be sufficiently tumble-down and derelict.  If this be incorrect, how could such swarms of artistic folk paint and actually lodge in Staithes?  The steep road leading past the station drops down into the village, giving a glimpse of the beck crossed by its ramshackle wooden foot-bridge—­the view one has been prepared for by guide-books and picture postcards.  Lower down you enter the village street.  Here the smell of fish comes out to greet you, and one would forgive the place this overflowing welcome if one were not so shocked at the dismal aspect of the houses on either side of the way.  Many are of comparatively recent origin, others are quite new, and a few—­a very few—­are old; but none have any architectural pretensions or any claims to picturesqueness, and only a few have the neat and respectable look one is accustomed to expect after seeing Robin Hood’s Bay.

Staithes had filled me with so much pleasant expectancy that my first walk down this street of dirty, ugly houses had brought me into a querulous frame of mind, and I wondered irritably why the women should all wear lilac-coloured bonnets, when a choice of colour is not difficult as far as calico is concerned.  Those women who were in mourning had dyed theirs black, and these assorted well with the colour of the stone of many of the houses.

I hurried down on to the little fish-wharf—­a wooden structure facing the sea—­hoping to find something more cheering in the view of the little bay, with its bold cliffs, and the busy scene where the cobles were drawn up on the shingle.  Here my spirits revived, and I began to find excuses for the painters.  The little wharf, in a bad state of repair, like most things in the place, was occupied by groups of stalwart fisher-folk, men and women.

The men were for the most part watching their women-folk at work.  They were also to an astonishing extent mere spectators in the arduous work of hauling the cobles one by one on to the steep bank of shingle.  A tackle hooked to one of the baulks of timber forming the staith was being hauled at by five women and two men!  Two others were in a listless fashion leaning their shoulders against the boat itself.  With the last ‘Heave-ho!’ at the shortened tackle the women laid hold of the nets, and with casual male assistance laid them out on the shingle, removed any fragments of fish, and generally prepared them for stowing in the boat again.

It is evidently an accepted state of things at Staithes that the work of putting out to sea and the actual catching of the fish is sufficient for the men-folk, for the feminine population do their arduous tasks with a methodical matter-of-factness which surprises only the stranger.  I was particularly struck on one occasion with the sight of a good-looking and very neatly dressed young fishwife who was engaged