presence of his cousin, now rising in years, and who, during her long widowhood, had sought and found consolation, amid her troubles and privations, where it was surest to be found. She was a meek-spirited, sincerely pious woman; and the sailor, during his more distant voyages,—for he sometimes traded with ports of the Baltic on the one hand, and with those of Ireland and the south of England on the other,—had the comfort of knowing that his wife, who had fallen into a state of health chronically delicate, was sedulously tended and cared for by a devoted mother. The happiness which he would have otherwise enjoyed was, however, marred in some degree by his wife's great delicacy of constitution, and ultimately blighted by two unhappy accidents.

He had not lost the nature which had been evinced at an early age beside the pond: for a man who had often looked death in the face, he had remained nicely tender of human life, and had often hazarded his own in preserving that of others; and when accompanied, on one occasion, by his wife and her mother to his vessel, just previous to sailing, he had unfortunately to exert himself in her presence, in behalf of one of his seamen, in a way that gave her constitution a shock from which it never recovered. A clear frosty moonlight evening had set in; the pier-head was glistening with new-formed ice; and one of the sailors, when engaged in casting over a haulser which he had just loosed, missed footing on the treacherous margin, and fell into the sea. The master knew his man could not swim; a powerful seaward tide sweeps past the place with the first hours of ebb; there was not a moment to be lost; and, hastily throwing off his heavy greatcoat, he plunged after him, and in an instant the strong current swept them both out of sight. He succeeded, however, in laying hold of the half-drowned man, and, striking with him from out the perilous tideway into an eddy, with a Herculean effort he regained the quay. On reaching it, his wife lay insensible in the arms of her mother; and as she was at the time in the delicate condition incidental to married women, the natural consequence followed, and she never recovered the shock, but lingered for more than a twelve-mouth, the mere shadow of her former self; when a second event, as untoward as the first, too violently shook the fast ebbing sands, and precipitated her dissolution.

A prolonged tempest from the stormy north-east had swept the Moray Firth of its shipping, and congregated the stormbound vessels by scores in the noble harbour of Cromarty, when the wind chopped suddenly round, and they all set out to sea,—the sloop of the master among the rest. The other vessels kept the open Firth; but the master, thoroughly acquainted with its navigation, and in the belief that the change of wind was but temporary, went on hugging the land on the weather side, till, as he had anticipated, the breeze set full into the old quarter, and increased into a gale. And then, when all the rest of the fleet had no other choice left them than just to scud back again, he struck out into the Firth in a long tack, and, doubling Kinnaird's Head and the dreaded Buchan Ness, succeeded in making good his voyage south. Next morning the wind-bound vessels were crowding the harbour of refuge as before, and only his sloop was amissing. The first war of the French Revolution had broken out at the time; it was known there were several French privateers hovering on the coast; and the report went abroad that the missing sloop had been captured by the French. There was a weather-brained tailor in the neighbourhood, who used to do very odd things, especially, it was said, when the moon was at the full, and whom the writer remembers from the circumstance that he fabricated for him his first jacket, and that, though he succeeded in sewing on one sleeve to the hole at the shoulder, where it ought to be, he committed the slight mistake of sewing on the other sleeve to one of the pocket-holes. Poor Andrew Fern had heard that his townsman's sloop had been captured by a privateer, and, fidgety with impatience till he had communicated the intelligence where he thought it would tell most effectively, he called on the master's wife, to ask whether she had not heard that all the wind-bound vessels had got back again save the master's, and to wonder no one had yet told her that, if his had not got back, it was simply because it had been taken by the French. The tailor's communication told more powerfully than he could have anticipated: in less than a week after, the master's wife was dead; and long ere her husband's return she was lying in the quiet family burying-place, in which—so heavy were the drafts made by accident and violent death on the family—the remains of none of the male members had been deposited for more than a hundred years.

The mother, now left, by the death of her daughter, to a dreary solitude, sought to relieve its tedium, during the absence of her son-in-law when on his frequent voyages, by keeping, as she had done ere his return from foreign parts, a humble school. It was attended by two little girls, the children of a distant relation but very dear friend, the wife of a tradesman of the place,—a woman, like herself, of sincere though unpretending piety. Their similarity of character in this respect could hardly be traced to their common ancestor. He was the last curate of the neighbouring parish of Nigg; and, though not one of those intolerant Episcopalian ministers that succeeded in rendering their Church thoroughly hateful to the Scottish people,—for he was a simple, easy man, of much good nature,—he was, if tradition speak true, as little religious as any of them. In one of the earlier replies to that curious work, "Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed," I find a nonsensical passage from one of the curate's sermons, given as a set-off against the Presbyterian nonsense adduced by the other side. "Mr. James M'Kenzie, curate of Nigg in Ross," says the writer, "describing eternity to his parishioners, told them that in that state they would be immortalized, so that nothing could hurt them: a slash of a broadsword could not hurt you, saith he; nay, a cannon-ball would play but baff on you." Most of the curate's descendants were stanch Presbyterians, and animated by a greatly stronger spirit than his; and there were none of them stancher in their Presbyterianism than the two elderly women who counted kin from him in the fourth degree, and who, on the basis of a common faith, had become attached friends. The little girls were great favourites with the schoolmistress; and when, as she rose in years, her health began to fail, the elder of the two removed from her mother's house, to live with, and take care of her; and the younger, who was now shooting up into a pretty young woman, used, as before, to pass much of her time with her sister and her old mistress.

Meanwhile the shipmaster was thriving. He purchased a site for a house beside that of his buccaneering grandfather, and built for himself and his aged relative a respectable dwelling, which cost him about four hundred pounds, and entitled his son, the writer, to exercise the franchise, on the passing, considerably more than thirty years after, of the Reform Bill. The new house was, however, never to be inhabited by its builder; for, ere it was fully finished, he was overtaken by a sad calamity, that, to a man of less energy and determination, would have been ruin, and in consequence of which he had to content himself with the old house as before, and almost to begin the world anew. I have now reached a point in my narrative at which, from my connexion with the two little girls,—both of whom still live in the somewhat altered character of women far advanced in life,—I can be as minute in its details as I please; and the details of