But what most enchanted Flora, was the antique costume of the Newhaven fish-women, as, seated upon their upturned baskets, they called the attention of the visitor to their various stores of fish.
Flora was never tired of looking at these sea-maids and matrons. Their primitive appearance, and quaint, old-fashioned dress, took her fancy greatly—with their short petticoats, their blue stockings and buckled shoes, their neat, striped linen-jackets, and queer little caps, just covering the top of their head, and coming down in long, straight mobs, over their ears; their honest, broad features, and pleasant faces, which had been fair before the sun and the sea air tanned them to that warm, deep brown; their round, red arms, and handsome feet and legs, displayed with a freedom and ease which custom had robbed of all indecorum, and rendered natural and proper.
Flora wished that she had been an artist, to copy some of the fine forms she saw among these fish-girls—forms which had been left as the great God of nature made them, uncrippled by torturing stays and tight vestments. How easy their carriage! with what rude grace they poised upon their heads their ponderous baskets, and walked erect and firm, filling the air with their mournfully-musical cry! The great resemblance between these people and the Bavarian broom-girls, both in features and costume, impressed her with the idea, that they had originally belonged to the same race. The Newhaven sea-nymph, however, is taller, and has a more imposing presence, than the short, snub-nosed Bavarian.
But time, that waits on no one’s fancy or caprice, warned her that she must not linger over a scene which she afterwards visited with renewed pleasure, but gave her a gentle hint, that there was work to be done at home—that she had better make her purchases and proceed to business.
She returned, therefore, to her lodgings in high spirits, despatching Jim to the greengrocer’s in the next street, and then followed Hannah and her basket into Mrs. Waddel’s kitchen.
“Marcy me! what ha’ ye got, the noo?” said Mistress Waddel, lifting the napkin from the basket: “meat enough, I declare, to last the hale week. The weather’s owr hot, I’m thinkin’, for a’ they to keep sweet sae lang.”