listened intently, with mercantile views.

He had the widow's sorrows all off pat.

He was not a bit affected himself, but by pure memory he remembered
where she had been most agitated or overcome.

He gave it Christie, word for word, and even threw in what dramatists
call "the business," thus:

"Here ye suld greet--"

"Here ye'll play your hand like a geraffe."

"Geraffe? That's a beast, I'm thinking."

"Na; it's the thing on the hill that makes signals."

"Telegraph, ye fulish goloshen!"

"Oo ay, telegraph! Geraffe 's sunest said for a'."

Thus Jess Rutherford's life came into Christie Johnstone's hands.

She told it to a knot of natives next day; it lost nothing, for she was
a woman of feeling, and by intuition an artist of the tongue. She was
the best _raconteur_ in a place where there are a hundred, male and
female, who attempt that art.

The next day she told it again, and then inferior narrators got hold of
it, and it soon circulated through the town.

And this was the cause of the sudden sympathy with Jess Rutherford.

As our prigs would say:

"Art had adopted her cause and adorned her tale."

CHAPTER V.

THE fishing village of Newhaven is an unique place; it is a colony
that retains distinct features; the people seldom intermarry with their
Scotch neighbors.

Some say the colony is Dutch, some Danish, some Flemish. The character
and cleanliness of their female costume points rather to the latter.

Fish, like horse-flesh, corrupts the mind and manners.

After a certain age, the Newhaven fishwife is always a blackguard, and
ugly; but among the younger specimens, who have not traded too much, or
come into much contact with larger towns, a charming modesty, or else
slyness (such as no man can distinguish from it, so it answers every
purpose), is to be found, combined with rare grace and beauty.

It is a race of women that the northern sun peachifies instead of
rosewoodizing.

On Sundays the majority sacrifice appearance to fashion; these turn out
rainbows of silk, satin and lace. In the week they were all grace, and
no stays; now they seem all stays and no grace. They never look so ill
as when they change their "costume" for "dress."

The men are smart fishermen, distinguished from the other fishermen of
the Firth chiefly by their "dredging song."

This old song is money to them; thus:

Dredging is practically very stiff rowing for ten hours.

Now both the Newhaven men and their