over the edge of her pail, you could see how she had come by her erect
carriage. When the boats came in, she went to the beach and helped to
carry the baskets of fish to the cart. She was then dressed in a sort of
thick flannel blouse and a singular quantity of brief petticoats. Her
head was bare, and she looked far better than in her Sunday clothes. If
the morning were fine she sat out in the sun and baited the lines, all
the while lilting old country songs in her guttural dialect. In the
evening she would spend some time chatting with other lasses in the Row;
but she never had a very long spell of that pastime, for she had to be
at work winter and summer by about five or six in the morning. The
fisher-folk do not waste many candles by keeping late hours. She was
very healthy and powerful, very ignorant, and very modest. Had she lived
by one of the big harbours, where fleets of boats come in, she might
have been as rough and brazen as the girls often are in those places.
But in her secluded little village the ways of the people were
old-fashioned and decorous; and girls were very restrained in their
manners. No one would have taken her to be anything more than an
ordinary country girl had not a chance enabled her to show herself full
of bravery and resource.

Every boat in the village went away North one evening, and not a man
remained in the Row excepting three very old fellows, who were long past
work of any kind. When a fisherman grows helpless with age he is kept by
his own people, and his days are passed in quietly smoking on the
kitchen settle or in looking dimly out over the sea from the bench at
the door. But a man must be sorely "failed" before he is reduced to
idleness, and able to do nothing that needs strength. A southerly gale,
with a southerly sea, came away in the night, and the boats could not
beat down from the northward. By daylight they were all safe in a
harbour about eighteen miles north of the village. The sea grew worse