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 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