22 FHE UNAPPRECIATED FISHER FOLK. 
is that they are hardy and willing labourers, anxious to 
earn a few pounds when “siller is a-going.” 
As to the women, the Fraserburgh correspondent of the 
Scotsman newspaper recently stated that, “Women, to 
work as gutters, are in great demand, and the wages offered 
them are quite unprecedented. The rates of arles for the 
eight weeks’ work run from £1 10s. to £5 each, besides 8d. 
per barrel gutted and packed by the crew. It is only a few 
years since a woman considered herself highly paid if she 
got 5s. of arles. A number of women belonging to the 
town have gone to Shetland this season, and the present 
competition is, no doubt, due to that.” 
Mr. James Wilson’s description (Voyage Round the Coast 
of Scotland, 1842) of the work of gutting is graphic: 
“though the gutters are not a few of them good-looking 
creatures, yet the appearance of the general mass after they 
have worked an hour or two, beggars all description. Their 
hands, their necks, their busts, their 
‘ Dreadful faces throng’d, and fiery arms’ 
every bit about them fore and aft, are spotted and be- 
sprinkled with little scarlet clots of gills and guts, or as 
Southey says of the war horse of Don Roderick, after the 
last and fatal fight— 
‘Their flanks incarnadined, 
Their poitral smeared with blood.’ 
Bloody and all begrimed with slime the gutter stands up 
with knife in hand, or stoops her horrid head ‘with scaly 
armour bright, and plunging her bare and brawny arms 
again into the trough, scatters her gills and guts, as if no 
bowels of compassion existed any more on this terraqueous 
globe... . Towards evening they carefully wash their 
faces, arms and legs, and slip on again their better gar- 
ments. Thus they never appear except around the gutting 
