held how long and
how desperately ye struggled wi' the raging waves. A scream burst
upon my ear--a woman rushed through the crowd--and then, John!--oh,
then!"---- But here the feelings of the old man overpowered him. He
sobbed aloud, and pausing for a few moments, added--"Tell him, some o'
ye."

The preacher took up the tale. "Hearken unto me, John Crawford," said
he. "Ye have reason, this day, to sorrow, and to rejoice, and to be
grateful beyond measure. In the morning, ye mocked my counsel and set
at nought my reproof; and as ye sowed so have ye reaped. But, as your
faither-in-law has told ye, when your face was recognised from the
shore, and your name mentioned, a woman screamed--she rushed through the
multitude--she plunged into the boiling sea, and in an instant she was
beyond the reach of help!"

"Speak!--speak on!" cried the fisherman eagerly; and he placed his hands
on his heaving bosom, and gazed anxiously, now towards the preacher, and
again towards his Agnes, who wept upon his shoulder.

"The Providence that had till then sustained you, while your fellow
creatures perished around you," added the clergyman, "supported her. She
reached you--she grasped your arm. After long struggling, she brought
you within a few yards of the shore; a wave overwhelmed you both and
cast you upon the beach, with her arm--the arm of your wife that saved
you--upon your bosom!"

"Gracious Heaven!" exclaimed the fisherman, pressing his wife to his
bosom--"my ain Agnes!--was it you?--was it you?--my wife!--my saviour!"
And he wept aloud, and his children wept also.

But the feelings of the wife and the mother were too strong for words.
I will not dwell upon the joy and gratitude of the family to whom the
husband and the father had been restored as from the dead. It found a
sorrowful contrast in the voice of lamentation and of mourning, which
echoed along the coast like the peal of an alarm-bell. The dead were
laid in heaps upon the beach, and, on the following day, widows,
orphans, parents, and brothers, came from all the fishing towns along
the coast, to seek their dead amongst the drowned that had been gathered
together; or, if they found them not, they wandered along the shore to
seek for them where the sea might have cast them forth. Such is the tale
of the Sabbath wrecks--of the lost drave of Dunbar.

END OF VOL. VI.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILSON'S TALES OF THE BORDERS AND OF
SCOTLAND, VOLUME VI***