rt.

"Mary, girl," said I, "this is the place I had learned to call my home,
and I do not know it."

"It is my home by nature, not by the learning," she replied; "the place
I was born and the place I'm like to die in; and I neither like these
changes, nor the way they came, nor that which came with them. I would
have liked better, under God's pleasure, they had gone down into the
sea, and the Merry Men were dancing on them now."

Mary was always serious; it was perhaps the only trait that she shared
with her father; but the tone with which she uttered these words was
even graver than of custom.

"Ay," said I, "I feared it came by wreck, and that's by death; yet when
my father died I took his goods without remorse."

"Your father died a clean-strae death, as the folk say," said Mary.

"True," I returned; "and a wreck is like a judgment. What was she
called?"

"They ca'd her the _Christ-Anna_," said a voice behind me; and, turning
round, I saw my uncle standing in the doorway.

He was a sour, small, bilious man, with a long face and very dark eyes;
fifty-six years old, sound and active in body, and with an air somewhat
between that of a shepherd and that of a man following the sea. He never
laughed, that I heard; read long at the Bible; prayed much, like the
Cameronians he had been brought up among; and, indeed, in many ways,
used to remind me of one of the hill-preachers in the killing times
before the Revolution. But he never got much comfort, nor even, as I
used to think, much guidance, by his piety. He had his black fits when
he was afraid of hell; but he had led a rough life, to which he would
look back with envy, and was still a rough, cold, gloomy man.

As he came in at the door out of the sunlight, with his bonnet on his
head and a pipe hanging in his button-hole, he seemed, like Rorie, to
have grown older and paler, the lines were deeplier ploughed upon his
face, and the whites of his eyes were yellow, like old stained ivory, or
the bones of the dead.

"Ay," he repeated, dwelling upon the first part of the word, "the
_Christ-Anna_. It's an awfu' name."

I made him my salutations, and complimented him upon his look of health;
for I feared he had perhaps been ill.

"I'm in the body," he replied, ungraciously enough; "aye in the body and
the sins of the body, like yoursel'. Denner," he said abruptly to Mary,
and then ran on, to me: "They're grand braws, thir that we hae gotten,
are they no'? Yon's a b