. Knowing the nature of the bottom,--a soft arenaceous mud,
which if beat for some time by the foot or hand, resolved itself into a
sort of quicksand, half-sludge, half-water, which, when covered by a
competent depth of sea, could offer no effectual resistance to a ship's
keel,--the master had set half the crew to run in a body from side to
side, till, by the motion generated in this way, the portion of the bank
immediately beneath was beaten soft; and then the other moiety of the
men, tugging hard on kedge and haulser, drew the vessel off a few feet
at a time, till at length, after not a few repetitions of the process,
she floated free. Of course, on a harder bottom the expedient would not
have availed; but so struck was the commander by its efficacy and
originality, and by the extent of the master's professional resources,
that he strongly recommended him to part with his sloop, and enter the
navy, where he thought he had influence enough, he said, to get him
placed in a proper position. But as the master's previous experience of
the service had been of a very disagreeable kind, and as his position,
as at once master and owner of the vessel he sailed, was at least an
independent one, he declined acting on the advice.

Such are some of my earlier recollections. But there was a time of
sterner memories at hand. The kelp trade had not yet attained to the
importance which it afterwards acquired, ere it fell before the first
approaches of Free Trade; and my father, in collecting a supply for the
Leith Glass Works, for which he occasionally acted both as agent and
shipmaster, used sometimes to spend whole months amid the Hebrides,
sailing from station to station, and purchasing here a few tons and
there a few hundredweights, until he had completed his cargo. In his
last kelp voyage he had been detained in this way from the close of
August till the end of October; and at length, deeply laden, he had
threaded his way round Cape Wrath, and through the Pentland and across
the Moray Firths, when a severe gale compelled him to seek shelter in
the harbour of Peterhead. From that port, on the 9th of November 1807,
he wrote my mother the last letter she ever received from him; for on
the day after he sailed from it there arose a terrible tempest, in which
many seamen perished, and he and his crew were never more heard of. His
sloop was last seen by a brother townsman and shipmaster, who, ere the
storm came on, had been fortunate enou