A few gay-dressed women, escorted by officers, held themselves apart from the soldiers' sweethearting, and were disposed, I thought, to look a little scornfully on it. The soldiers did not seem to mind the affront, if they saw it; no doubt, they thought their own sweethearts far the better looking, and if they had ever heard of it would have quoted with hearty good-will the old ballad,—
"The lassies o' the Cannongate,
Oh, they are wondrous nice:
They winna gie a single kiss,
But for a double price.
"Gar hang them, gar hang them,
Hie upon a tree;
For we'll get better up the gate,
For a bawbee!"
Most picturesque of all the figures to be seen in Edinburgh are the Newhaven fishwives. With short, full blue cloth petticoats, reaching barely to their ankles; white blouses and gay kerchiefs; big, long-sleeved cloaks of the same blue cloth, fastened at the throat, but flying loose, sleeves and all, as if thrown on in haste; the girls bareheaded; the married women with white caps, standing up stiff and straight in a point on the top of the head; two big wickerwork creels, one above the other, full of fish, packed securely, on their broad shoulders, and held in place by a stout leather strap passing round their foreheads, they pull along at a steady, striding gait, up hill and down, carrying weights that it taxes a man's strength merely to lift. In fact, it is a fishwife's boast that she will run with a weight which it takes two men to put on her back. By reason of this great strength on the part of the women, and their immemorial habit of exercising it; perhaps also from other causes far back in the early days of Jutland, where these curious Newhaven fishing-folk are said to have originated,—it has come about that the Newhaven men are a singularly docile and submissive race. The wives keep all the money which they receive for the fish, and the husbands take what is given them,—a singular reversion of the situation in most communities. I did not believe this when it was told me; so I stopped three fishwives one day, and without mincing matters put the question direct to them. Two of them were young, one old. The young women laughed saucily, and the old woman smiled; but they all replied unhesitatingly, that they had the spending of all the money.