FITTIE. 317 



hope, as a period of money-making, and -whicli, so far as the young 

 people are concerned, is generally expected to end, like the third 

 volume of a love-story, in matrimony. 



Footdee, or "Mttie" as it is locally called, is a quamt 

 suburb of Aberdeen, figuring not a little, and always with a 

 kind of comic quaintness, in the traditions of that northern city, 

 and in the stories which the inhabitants teU of each other. 

 They tell there of one Aberdeen man, who, being in London for 

 the first time, and visiting St. Paul's, was surprised by his 

 astonishment at its dimensions into an unusual burst of candour. 

 " My stars ! " he said, " this maks a perfect feel (fool) o'. the 

 kirk o' Mttie." Part of the quaint interest thus attached to 

 this particular suburb by the Aberdonians themselves arises 

 from its containing a little colony or nest of fisher-folk of 

 immemorial antiquity. There are about a hundred families 

 living in Fittie, or Footdee Square, close to the sea^ where the 

 Dee has its mouth. This community, like all others made up 

 of fishing-folk, is a peculiar one, and difiers of course from those 

 of other working-people in its neighbourhood. In many things 

 the Footdee people are like the gipsies. They rarely marry 

 except with their own class ; and those born in a community of 

 fishers seldom leave it,, and very seldom engage in any other 

 avocation than that of their fathers. The squares of houses at 

 Footdee are peculiarly constructed. There are neither doors 

 nor windows in the outside walls, although these look to aU the 

 points of the compass ; and none live within the square but the 

 fishermen and their families, so that they are as completely 

 isolated and secluded from public gaze as a regiment of soldiers 

 within the dead walls of a barrack. The Eeverend Mr. Spence, 

 of Free St. Clement's, lately completed plans of the entire 

 " toun," giving the number and the names of the tenants in 

 every house ; and from these exhaustive plans it appears that 

 the total population of the two squares was 584 — giving about 

 nine inmates for each of these two-roomed houses. • But the 

 case is even worse than this average indicates. " In the 

 South Square only eight of the houses are occupied by single 

 families ; and in the North Square only three, the others being 

 occupied by at least two families each— one room apiece — 

 and four sirigle rooms in the North Square contain two families 

 each ! There are thirty-six married couples and nineteen 

 widows in the twenty-eight houses ; and the number of distinct 

 families in them is fifty-four." 'The Fittie men seem poorer 



