ommitted the
slight mistake of sewing on the other sleeve to one of the pocket-holes.
Poor Andrew Fern had heard that his townsman's sloop had been captured
by a privateer, and, fidgety with impatience till he had communicated
the intelligence where he thought it would tell most effectively, he
called on the master's wife, to ask whether she had not heard that all
the wind-bound vessels had got back again save the master's, and to
wonder no one had yet told her that, if _his_ had not got back, it was
simply because it had been taken by the French. The tailor's
communication told more powerfully than he could have anticipated: in
less than a week after, the master's wife was dead; and long ere her
husband's return she was lying in the quiet family burying-place, in
which--so heavy were the drafts made by accident and violent death on
the family--the remains of none of the male members had been deposited
for more than a hundred years.

The mother, now left, by the death of her daughter, to a dreary
solitude, sought to relieve its tedium, during the absence of her
son-in-law when on his frequent voyages, by keeping, as she had done ere
his return from foreign parts, a humble school. It was attended by two
little girls, the children of a distant relation but very dear friend,
the wife of a tradesman of the place,--a woman, like herself, of sincere
though unpretending piety. Their similarity of character in this respect
could hardly be traced to their common ancestor. He was the last curate
of the neighbouring parish of Nigg; and, though not one of those
intolerant Episcopalian ministers that succeeded in rendering their
Church thoroughly hateful to the Scottish people,--for he was a simple,
easy man, of much good nature,--he was, if tradition speak true, as
little religious as any of them. In one of the earlier replies to that
curious work, "Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed," I find a
nonsensical passage from one of the curate's sermons, given as a set-off
against the Presbyterian nonsense adduced by the other side. "Mr. James
M'Kenzie, curate of Nigg in Ross," says the writer, "describing eternity
to his parishioners, told them that in that state they would be
immortalized, so that nothing could hurt them: a slash of a broadsword
could not hurt you, saith he; nay, a cannon-ball would play but _baff_
on you." Most of the curate's descendants were stanch Presbyterians, and
animated by a greatly stronger spirit than hi