INTERIOR OF A FISHERMAN'S HOUSE. 307 



to day, as half a century ago, the fishermen sit beside their 

 hauled-up boats, in their white canvas trousers and their 

 Guernsey shirts, smoking their short pipes, while their wives 

 and daughters are so employed, seeming to have no idea of any- 

 thing in the shape, of labour being a duty of theirs when ashore. 

 In the flowing gutter, which trickles down the centre of the 

 old viUage, we have the young idea developing itself in plenty of 

 noise, and adding another layer to the incrustation of dirt which 

 it seems to be the sole business of these children to collect on 

 their bodies. These juvenile fisher-folk have already learned 

 from the mud-larks of the Thames the practice of sporting on 

 the sands before the hotel windows, in the expectation of being 

 rewarded with a few halfpence. "What's the use of asking 

 for siller before they've gotten their denner?" we once heard 

 one of these precocious youths say to another, who was proposing 

 to solicit a bawbee from a party of strangers. 



To see the people of Newhaven, both men and women, one 

 would be apt to think that their social condition was one of 

 great hardship and discomfort ; but one has only to enter their 

 dwellings in order to be disabused of this notion, and to be 

 convinced of the reverse of this, for there are few houses among 

 the working population of Scotland which can compare with 

 the well-decked and well-plenished dwellings of these fishermen. 

 Within doors all is neat and tidy. When at the marriage I 

 have mentioned, I thought the house I was invited to was the 

 cleanest and the cosiest-looking house I had ever seen. Never 

 did I see before so many plates and bowls in any private 

 dwelling ; and on all of them, cups and saucers not excepted, 

 fish, with their fins spread wide out, were painted in glowing 

 colours ; and in their dwellings and domestic arrangements the 

 Newhaven fishwives are the cleanest women in Scotland, and 

 the comfort of their husbands when they return from their 

 labours on the wild and dangerous deep seems to be the fish- 

 wife's chief delight. I may also mention that none of the young 

 women of Newhaven will take a husband Out of their own 

 community, that they are as rigid in this matrimonial observance 

 as if they were all Jewesses.* 



* "There -fishermen and fishennen's daughters marry and are given in 

 marriage tp each other with a sacredness only second to the strictness of 

 intermarriage ohserved among the Jews. On making inquiry we iind that 

 occasionally one of these buxom young damsels chooses a hushand for her- 

 self elsewhere than from among her own community ; hut we understand 



