"There's the only man in all Scotland that 'ud be seen carryin' a creel o' fish on his back like a woman," said he. "He's na pride aboot him."
"But why shouldn't men carry creels?" I asked. "I'm sure it is very hard work for women."
The sailor eyed me for a moment perplexedly, and then as if it were waste of words to undertake to explain self-evident propositions, resumed,—
"He worked at it when he was a boy, with his mother; an' now he's no pride left. There's the whole village been at him to get a barrow; but he'll not do't. He's na pride aboot him."
What an interesting addition it would be to the statistics of foods eaten by different peoples to collect the statistics of the different foods with which pride's hunger is satisfied in different countries! Its stomach has as many and opposite standards as the human digestive apparatus. It is, like everything else, all and only a question of climate. Not a nabob anywhere who gets more daily satisfaction out of despising his neighbors than the Newhaven fishermen do out of their conscious superiority to this poor soul, who lugs his fish in a basket on his back like a woman, and has "na pride aboot him."
If I had had time and opportunity to probe one layer farther down in Newhaven society, no doubt I should have come upon something which even this pariah, the fish-carrying man, would scorn to be seen doing.
After the last toiling fishwife had disappeared in the distance, and the wharf and the village had quieted down into sombre stillness, I drove to "The Peacock," and ate bread and milk in a room which, if it were not the very one in which Christie and her lover supped, at least looked out on the same sea they looked upon. And a very gray, ugly sea it was, too; just such an one as used to stir Christie's soul with a heat of desire to spin out into it, and show the boys she was without fear. On the stony beach below the inn a woman was spreading linen to dry. Her motions as she raised and bent, and raised and bent, over her task were graceful beyond measure. Scuds of rain-drops swept by now and then; and she would stop her work, and straightening herself into a splendid pose, with one hand on her hip, throw back her head, and sweep the whole sky with her look, uncertain whether to keep on with her labor or not; then bend again, and make greater haste than before.
As I drove out of the village I found a knot of the women gossiping at a corner. They had gathered around a young wife, who had evidently brought out her baby for the village to admire. It was dressed in very "braw attire" for Newhaven,—snowy white, and embroidery, and blue ribbons. It was but four weeks old, and its tiny red face was nearly covered up by the fine clothes. I said to a white-haired woman in the group,—
"Do you recollect when it was all open down to the sea here,—before this second line of newer cottages was built?"
She shook her head and replied, "I'm na so auld 's I luik; my hair it wentit white—" After a second's pause, and turning her eyes out to sea as she spoke, she added, "A' 't once it wentit white."