The wrath of these good-natured and kind-hearted people was notoriously harmless. Stabs were unknown, and blows rare among them, but the language of their vituperation was expressive and opprobrious. My informant has seen a woman in a passion take up a handful of burning coals, and lay them down without seeming to feel pain. Ladies drilled in the control of their gestures, if not of their feelings, in boarding-schools, witnessed, with great astonishment, the violence with which the women expressed grief and lamentation. The boats were frequently in great danger in crossing the bar, and on these occasions the women assembled upon the beach would tear their hair, clap their hands, and utter piercing cries and shrieks. The simple and natural principles upon which their marriages were formed, the chastity and honour in which the married fishers lived, and the connubial and family happiness of their homes, may explain, in part, the violence of the emotions and the exuberance of the gestures of the wives when their husbands were in danger. A fashionable dame of London related sarcastically that she had known a fisherwoman of the Scotch east coast who required four men to keep her from throwing herself over the rocks when her drowned husband was carried into her cottage, become calm in a fortnight, recommence work in a month, and marry again in a twelvemonth. The poor child of nature had no sentiment! The marriages of the fishers were as natural and simple as the unions of Isaac with Rebekah and Boaz with Ruth. Perversions about dowries, pin-money, establishments, and settlements, did not interfere with the natural action of mutual interest and honest preference. They married young. The young man and young woman had probably played together in childhood. Running, leaping, tumbling, paddling, laughing, the children of the fishers are as joyous as their fathers are serious; and if their mothers could not match them against the children of the Tuileries’ Gardens, or of St. James’s Park, in point of pretty costumes, they could challenge the world for them in regard to the healthiness of their respiratory organs and the glee of their animal spirits. The boys and girls soon become useful, the elder children being early employed to nurse the younger. Both boys and girls thus grow up in systematic training for the performance of the duties of their lives.