His bare mention of her troubles had surprised the widowed woman's heart,
and now she looked up and examined his countenance; it was soon done.

A woman, young or old, high or low, can discern and appreciate
sensibility in a man's face, at a single glance.

What she saw there was enough. She was sure of sympathy. She recalled her
resolve, and the tale of her sorrows burst from her like a flood.

Then the old fishwife told the young aristocrat how she had borne twelve
children, and buried six as bairns; how her man was always unlucky; how a
mast fell on him, and disabled him a whole season; how they could but
just keep the pot boiling by the deep-sea fishing, and he was not allowed
to dredge for oysters, because his father was not a Newhaven man. How,
when the herring fishing came, to make all right, he never had another
man's luck; how his boat's crew would draw empty nets, and a boat
alongside him would be gunwale down in the water with the fish. How, at
last, one morning, the 20th day of November, his boat came in to Newhaven
Pier without him, and when he was inquired for, his crew said, "He had
stayed at home, like a lazy loon, and not sailed with them the night
before." How she was anxious, and had all the public houses searched.
"For he took a drop now and then, nae wonder, and him aye in the
weather." Poor thing! when he was alive she used to call him a drunken
scoundrel to his face. How, when the tide went down, a mad wife, whose
husband had been drowned twenty years ago, pointed out something under
the pier that the rest took for sea-weed floating--how it was the hair of
her man's head, washed about by the water, and he was there, drowned
without a cry or a struggle, by his enormous boots, that kept him in an
upright position, though he was dead; there he stood--dead--drowned by
slipping from the slippery pier, close to his comrades' hands, in a dark