426 BARGAINING. [CHAP. x. 



Exchequer.* Their husbands have only to catch the fish, their 

 labour being finished as soon as the boats touch the quay. 

 The Newhaven fishwife's mode of doing business is well 

 known. She is always supposed to ask double or triple what 

 she will take ; and, on occasions of bargaining, she is sure, in 

 allusion to the hazardous nature of the gudeman's occupation, 

 to tell her customers that " fish are no fish the day, they're 

 just men's lives." The style of higgling adopted when dealing 

 with the fisher-folk, if attempted in other kinds of commerce, 



* In the fishing villages on the Firths of Forth and Tay, as well as 

 elsewhere in Scotland, the government is gynecocracy. In the course 

 of the late war, and during the alarm of invasion, a fleet of transports 

 entered the Firth of Forth, under the convoy of some ships of war 

 which would reply to no signals. A general alarm was excited, in con- 

 sequence of which all the fishers who were enrolled as sea-fencibles 

 got 011 board the gunboats, which they were to man as occasion should 

 require, and sailed to oppose the supposed enemy. The foreigners proved 

 to be Eussians, with whom we were then at peace. The county gentle- 

 men of Mid-Lothian, pleased with the zeal displayed by the sea-fencibles 

 at a critical moment, passed a vote for presenting the community of 

 fishers with a silver punch-bowl, to be used on occasions of festivity. 

 But the fisher women, on hearing what was intended, put in their claim 

 to have some separate share in the intended honorary reward. The 

 men, they said, were their husbands; it was they who would have been 

 sufferers if their husbands had been killed, and it was by their permis- 

 sion and injunctions that they embarked on board the gunboats for the 

 public service. They therefore claimed to share the reward in some 

 manner which should distinguish the female patriotism which they had 

 shown on the occasion. The gentlemen of the county willingly ad- 

 mitted the claim ; and, without diminishing the value of their compli- 

 ment to the men, they made the females a present of a valuable brooch, 

 to fasten the plaid of the queen of the fisherwomen for the time. 



It may be further remarked, that these Nereids are punctillioas 

 among themselves, and observe different ranks according to the com- 

 modities they deal in. One experienced dame was heard to charac- 

 terise a younger damsel as " a puir silly thing, who had no ambition, 

 and would never," she prophesied, " rise above the mussel-line of busi- 

 ness." Note to Antiquary. 



