ooting 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 c