rivals are agreed that this song
lifts them through more work than untuned fishermen can manage.

I have heard the song, and seen the work done to it; and incline to
think it helps the oar, not only by keeping the time true, and the
spirit alive, but also by its favorable action on the lungs. It is sung
in a peculiar way; the sound is, as it were, expelled from the chest in
a sort of musical ejaculations; and the like, we know, was done by the
ancient gymnasts; and is done by the French bakers, in lifting their
enormous dough, and by our paviors.

The song, in itself, does not contain above seventy stock verses, but
these perennial lines are a nucleus, round which the men improvise the
topics of the day, giving, I know not for what reason, the preference to
such as verge upon indelicacy.

The men and women are musical and narrative; three out of four can sing
a song or tell a story, and they omit few opportunities.

Males and females suck whisky like milk, and are quarrelsome in
proportion. The men fight (round-handed), the women fleicht or scold, in
the form of a teapot--the handle fixed and the spout sawing the air.

A singular custom prevails here.

The maidens have only one sweetheart apiece!!!

So the whole town is in pairs.

The courting is all done on Saturday night, by the lady's fire. It is
hard to keep out of a groove in which all the town is running; and the
Johnstone had possessed, as mere property--a lad!

She was so wealthy that few of them could pretend to aspire to her, so
she selected for her chattel a young man called Willy Liston; a youth
of an unhappy turn--he contributed nothing to hilarity, his face was
a kill-joy--nobody liked him; for this female reason Christie
distinguished him.

He found a divine supper every Saturday night in her house; he ate, and
sighed! Christie fed him, and laughed at him.

Flucker ditto.

As she neither fed nor laughed at any other man, some twenty were
bitterly jealous of Willy Liston, and this gave the blighted youth a
cheerful moment or two.

But the bright alliance received a check some months before our tale.

Christie was _heluo librorum!_ and like others who have that taste, and
can only gratify it in the interval of manual exercise, she read very
intensely in her hours of study. A book absorbed her. She was like a
leech on these occasions, _non missura cutem._ Even Jean Carnie, her
co-adjutor or "neebor," as they call it, found it best to keep o