le grain of sense. I was for a time as civil to her as I could be,
but the more civility I showed, the more she talked, and the weather
being calm, the vessel made but little way. Such a prospect in a long
voyage as I had before me!

"Seeing that my civility had produced such a vexatious effect, I
endeavoured to shun the woman, but she singled me out, and even when I
pretended to be overwhelmed with the sickness, she would sit beside me,
and never cease from talking. If I went below to my bed, she would come
down and sit in the cabin, and tell a thousand stories about remedies
for the sea-sickness, for her husband had been a doctor, and had a great
reputation for skill. 'He was a worthy man,' quoth she, 'and had a world
of practice, so that he was seldom at home, and I was obliged to sit by
myself for hours in the day, without a living creature to speak to, and
obliged to make the iron tongs my companions, by which silence and
solitude I fell into low spirits; in the end, however, I broke out of
them, and from that day to this, I have enjoyed what the doctor called a
cheerful fecundity of words; but when he, in the winter following, was
laid up with the gout, he fashed at my spirits, and worked himself into
such a state of irritation against my endeavours to entertain him, that
the gout took his head, and he went out of the world like a pluff of
pouther, leaving me a very disconsolate widow; in which condition, it is
not every woman who can demean herself with the discretion that I have
done. Thanks be and praise, however, I have not been tempted beyond my
strength; for when Mr Pawkie, the seceder minister, came shortly after
the interment to catch me with the tear in my e'e, I saw through his
exhortations, and I told him upon the spot that he might refrain, for
it was my intent to spend the remainder of my days in sorrow and
lamentation for my dear deceased husband. Don't you think, sir,
it was a very proper rebuke to the first putting forth of his cloven
foot? But I had soon occasion to fear that I might stand in need of a
male protector; for what could I, a simple woman, do with the doctor's
bottles and pots, pills and other doses, to say nothing of his brazen
pestle and mortar, which of itself was a thing of value, and might be
coined, as I was told, into a firlot of farthings; not however that
farthings are now much in circulation, the pennies and new bawbees have
quite supplanted them, greatly, as I think, to the a