bedside, and pray to God to make the Bar good, so that he would give up
eating the poor fishermen.

Another incident connected with that coast lives in my mind. It was the
morning after a great storm--great even for that stormy coast--and the
passion-worn waters were still heaving with the memory of a fury that was
dead. Old Nick had scattered his marbles far and wide, and there were
rents and fissures in the pebbly wall such as the oldest fisherman had
never known before. Some of the hugest stones lay tossed a hundred yards
away, and the waters had dug pits here and there along the ridge so deep
that a tall man might stand in some of them, and yet his head not reach
the level of the sand.

Round one of these holes a small crowd was pressing eagerly, while one
man, standing in the hollow, was lifting the few remaining stones off
something that lay there at the bottom. I pushed my way between the
straggling legs of a big fisher lad, and peered over with the rest. A
ray of sunlight streamed down into the pit, and the thing at the bottom
gleamed white. Sprawling there among the black pebbles it looked like a
huge spider. One by one the last stones were lifted away, and the thing
was left bare, and then the crowd looked at one another and shivered.

"Wonder how he got there," said a woman at length; "somebody must ha'
helped him."

"Some foreign chap, no doubt," said the man who had lifted off the
stones; "washed ashore and buried here by the sea."

"What, six foot below the water-mark, wi' all they stones atop of him?"
said another.

"That's no foreign chap," cried a grizzled old woman, pressing forward.
"What's that that's aside him?"

Some one jumped down and took it from the stone where it lay glistening,
and handed it up to her, and she clutched it in her skinny hand. It was
a gold earring, such as fishermen sometimes wear. But this was a
somewhat large one, and of rather unusual shape.

"That's young Abram Parsons, I tell 'ee, as lies down there," cried the
old creature, wildly. "I ought to know. I gave him the pair o' these
forty year ago."

It may be only an idea of mine, born of after brooding upon the scene. I
am inclined to think it must be so, for I was only a child at the time,
and would hardly have noticed such a thing. But it seems to my
remembrance that as the old crone ceased, another woman in the crowd
raised her eyes slowly, and fixed them on a withered, ancient man, who
leant upo