thus happily employed in her labors of
love,--for such they emphatically were to her,--the daughter, a girl of
eighteen years of age, and two younger sons, were with their father on
the beach, assisting him in sorting, and putting in barrels, a quantity
of fish, designed for the family's use during the winter.

"It will be a fearful night, father," said the girl, pausing from her
labors, and looking out on the black, swollen waves, while the wind, as
it swept furiously by, more than once obliged her to cling to the rock
for support.

"It will be a fearful night, father," she repeated,--and, hesitating for
a moment, she added, "and brother William is at sea."

"Ay," responded the brawny, stalwart, and good-humored looking man, "it
will be, as you say, lass, a stormy night, and a terrible one, I reckon,
to poor seamen,--for there is more than William on the ocean."

A faint flush tinged with a deeper hue the girl's countenance, already
bronzed by exposure to sun and wind, while her dark grey eye grew moist
with unshed tears. It was evident that there was something deeper in the
old man's speech, than the mere words would seem to imply,--some covert
allusion which thus called forth her emotion.

"The vessel was to have left more than a week ago; it ought to be near
the coast by this time," said the fisherman, in a tone of uneasiness.

He turned to address his daughter, but she was no longer at his side;
and, looking in the distance, he perceived her climbing a high and
jutting rock, from which the ocean, for miles around, was distinctly
visible. Ellen, for that was her name, having at length ascended, stood
with agile yet firm feet on the eminence, shading, with one hand, the
sun, which now, peering from behind a mass of dark purple clouds, lit up
for a moment the turbid waves, and gleamed on rock and beach and
fishermen's huts,--and with the other holding on to the sharp edge of a
projecting rock, that still towered above her. Nor as she thus stood,
was she, by any means, an unpicturesque object; the sunshine glancing on
her neatly arranged brown hair, her tall figure, slight for that of a
hardy fisherman's child, clad in a black skirt and crimson jacket, and
every feature of her speaking countenance wearing a commingled
expression of anxiety, hope, and tenderness.

How her eager vision seemed to catch, in a moment, each feature of the
scene; the sandy beach--the rugged hill--her father's shallop--and he,
standing