ter.
Achty-sax is ower auld for a mon,--ower auld."

These are the sharp contrasts of life one cannot bear to face when one
is young and happy. Willie gave him a half-crown and some tobacco for
his pipe, and when the pony trotted off briskly, and we left the
shrunken figure alone on his bench as he was lonely in his life, we
kissed each other and pledged ourselves to look after him as long as
we remain in Pettybaw; for what is love worth if it does not kindle
the flames of spirit, open the gates of feeling, and widen the heart
to shelter all the little loves and great loves that crave
admittance?

As we neared the tiny fishing-village on the sands we met a fishwife
brave in her short skirt and eight petticoats, the basket with its two
hundred pound weight on her head, and the auld wife herself knitting
placidly as she walked along. They look superbly strong, these women;
but, to be sure, the "weak anes dee," as one of them told me.

There was an air of bustle about the little quay,--

"That joyfu' din when the boats come in,
When the boats come in sae early;
When the lift is blue an' the herring-nets fu',
And the sun glints in a' things rarely."

The silvery shoals of fish no longer come so near the shore as they
used in the olden time, for then the kirk bell of St. Monan's had its
tongue tied when the "draive" was off the coast, lest its knell should
frighten away the shining myriads of the deep.

We climbed the shoulder of a great green cliff until we could sit on
the rugged rocks at the top and overlook the sea. The bluff is well
named Nirly Scaur, and a wild, desolate spot it is, with gray
lichen-clad boulders and stunted heather on its summit. In a storm
here, the wind buffets and slashes and scourges one like invisible
whips, and below, the sea churns itself into foaming waves, driving
its "infinite squadrons of wild white horses" eternally toward the
shore. It was calm and blue to-day, and no sound disturbed the quiet
save the incessant shriek and scream of the rock birds, the
kittiwakes, black-headed gulls, and guillemots that live on the sides
of these high, sheer craigs. Here the mother guillemot lays her single
egg, and here, on these narrow shelves of precipitous rock, she holds
it in place with her foot until the warmth of her leg and overhanging
body hatches it into life, when she takes it on her back and flies
down to the sea. Motherhood under difficulties, it would seem, and the