village enabled me at once to determine why
and how it had perished. Though almost never used as food on the eastern
coast of Scotland, it had been inconsiderate enough to take the
fisherman's bait, as if it had been worthy of being eaten; and he had
avenged himself for the trouble it had cost him, by mounting it on cork,
and sending it off, to wander between wind and water, like the Flying
Dutchman, until it died. Was there ever on earth a creature save man
that could have played a fellow-mortal a trick at once so ingeniously
and gratuitously cruel? Or what would be the proper inference, were I to
find one of the many-thorned ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone
with the spines of its pectorals similarly fixed on cubes of
lignite?--that there had existed in these early ages not merely
_physical death_, but also _moral evil_; and that the being who
perpetrated the evil could not only inflict it simply for the sake of
the pleasure he found in it, and without prospect of advantage to
himself, but also by so adroitly reversing, fiend-like, the purposes of
the benevolent Designer, that the weapons given for the defence of a
poor harmless creature should be converted into the instruments of its
destruction. It was not without meaning that it was forbidden by the law
of Moses to seethe a kid in its mother's milk.

A steep bulwark in front, against which the tide lashes twice every
twenty-four hours,--an abrupt hill behind,--a few rows of squalid
cottages built of red sandstone, much wasted by the keen sea-winds,--a
wilderness of dunghills and ruinous pig-styes,--women seated at the
doors, employed in baiting lines or mending nets,--groups of men
lounging lazily at some gable-end fronting the sea,--herds of ragged
children playing in the lanes,--such are the components of the fishing
village of Gardenstone. From the identity of name, I had associated the
place with that Lord Gardenstone of the Court of Sessions who published,
late in the last century, a volume of "Miscellanies in Prose and Verse,"
containing, among other clever things, a series of tart criticisms on
English plays, transcribed, it was stated in the preface, from the
margins and fly-leaves of the books of a "small library kept open by his
Lordship" for the amusement of travellers at the inn of some village in
his immediate neighborhood; and taking it for granted, somehow, that
Gardenstone was the village, I was looking around me for the inn, in the
hope