s; 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 the misadventure which stripped the
shipmaster of the earnings of long years of carefulness and toil,
blended as they are with what an old critic might term a curious
_machinery_ of the supernatural, seem not unworthy of being given
unabridged.

Early in November 1797, two vessels--the one a smack in the London and
Inverness trade, the other the master's square-rigged sloop--lay
wind-bound for a few days on their passage north, in the port of
Peterhead. The weather, which had been stormy and unsettled, moderated
towards the evening of the fifth day of their detention; and the wind
chopping suddenly into the east, both vessels loosed from their
moorings, and, as a rather gloomy day was passing into still gloomier
night, they bore out to sea. The breeze soon freshened into a gale; the
gale swelled into a hurricane, accompanied by a thick snow-storm: and
when, early next morning, the smack opened the Firth, she was staggering
under he