r. That life of peril which casts the seaman much at
the mercy of every rough gale and lee-shore, and in which his
calculations regarding ultimate results must be always very doubtful,
has a strong tendency to render him superstitious. He is more removed,
too, than the landsman of his education and standing, from the influence
of general opinion, and the mayhap over-sceptical teaching of the Press;
and, as a consequence of their position and circumstances, I found, at
this period, seamen of the generation to which I myself belonged as firm
believers in wraiths, ghosts, and death-warnings, as the landward
contemporaries of my grandfather had been sixty years before. A series
of well-written nautical tales had appeared shortly previous to this
time in one of the metropolitan monthlies--the _London Magazine_, if I
rightly remember; and I was now interested to find in one of the
sailors' stories, the original of decidedly the best of their
number--"The Doomed Man." The author of the series--a Mr. Hamilton, it
was said, who afterwards became an Irvingite teacher, and grew too
scrupulous to exercise in fiction a very pleasing pen, though he
continued to employ, as a portrait-painter, a rather indifferent
pencil--had evidently sought such opportunities of listening to sailor's
stories as those on which I had at this time thrust myself. Very curious
materials for fiction may be found in this way by the _litterateur_. It
must be held that Sir Walter Scott was no incompetent judge of the
capabilities, for the purposes of the novelist, of a piece of narrative;
and yet we find him saying of the story told by a common sailor to his
friend William Clerk, which he records in the "Letters on Demonology and
Witchcraft," that "the tale, properly managed, might have made the
fortune of a romancer."

At times by day--for the sailors' stories were stories of the night--I
found interesting companionship in the society of a young student of
divinity, one of the passengers, who, though a lad of parts and
acquirements, did not deem it beneath him to converse on literary
subjects with a working man in pale moleskin, and with whom I did not
again meet until many years after, when we were both actively engaged in
prosecuting the same quarrel--he as one of the majority of the
Presbytery of Auchterarder, and I as editor of the leading newspaper of
the Non-Intrusion party. Perhaps the respected Free Church minister of
North Leith may be still able to