returned their salutes in the same
manner.

In the inside of the cottage was a scene which our Wilkie alone could
have painted, with that exquisite feeling of nature that characterises
his enchanting productions.

The body was laid in its coffin within the wooden bedstead which the
young fisher had occupied while alive. At a little distance stood the
father, whose rugged weather-beaten countenance, shaded by his
grizzled hair, had faced many a stormy night and night-like day. He was
apparently revolving his loss in his mind, with that strong feeling
of painful grief peculiar to harsh and rough characters, which almost
breaks forth into hatred against the world, and all that remain in it,
after the beloved object is withdrawn. The old man had made the most
desperate efforts to save his son, and had only been withheld by main
force from renewing them at a moment when, without the possibility
of assisting the sufferer, he must himself have perished. All this
apparently was boiling in his recollection. His glance was directed
sidelong towards the coffin, as to an object on which he could not
stedfastly look, and yet from which he could not withdraw his eyes. His
answers to the necessary questions which were occasionally put to him,
were brief, harsh, and almost fierce. His family had not yet dared to
address to him a word, either of sympathy or consolation. His masculine
wife, virago as she was, and absolute mistress of the family, as she
justly boasted herself, on all ordinary occasions, was, by this great
loss, terrified into silence and submission, and compelled to hide from
her husband's observation the bursts of her female sorrow. As he had
rejected food ever since the disaster had happened, not daring herself
to approach him, she had that morning, with affectionate artifice,
employed the youngest and favourite child to present her husband with
some nourishment. His first action was to put it from him with an angry
violence that frightened the child; his next, to snatch up the boy
and devour him with kisses. "Yell be a bra' fallow, an ye be spared,
Patie,--but ye'll never--never can be--what he was to me!--He has sailed the
coble wi' me since he was ten years auld, and there wasna the like
o' him drew a net betwixt this and Buchan-ness.--They say folks maun
submit--I will try."

And he had been silent from that moment until compelled to answer the
necessary questions we have already noticed. Such was the disconsola