and then, after a quarter of an hour's space began actually to creep upwards on the beach. But just hoping that there might be some mistake in the matter, which the evening tide would scarce fail to rectify, we continued to amuse ourselves, and to hope on. Hour after hour passed, lengthening as the shadows lengthened, and yet the tide still rose. The sun had sunk behind the precipices, and all was gloom along their bases, and double gloom in their caves; but their rugged brows still caught the red glare of evening. The flush rose higher and higher, chased by the shadows; and then, after lingering for a moment on their crests of honeysuckle and juniper, passed away, and the whole became sombre and gray. The sea-gull flapped upwards from where he had floated on the ripple, and hied him slowly away to his lodge in his deep-sea stack; the dusky cormorant flitted past, with heavier and more frequent stroke, to his whitened shelf on the precipice; the pigeons came whizzing downwards from the uplands and the opposite land, and disappeared amid the gloom of their caves; every creature that had wings made use of them in speeding homewards, but neither my companion nor myself had any, and there was no possibility of getting home without them. We made desperate efforts to scale the precipices, and on two several occasions succeeded in reaching midway shelves among the crags, where the peregrine-falcon and the raven build; but though we had climbed well enough to render our return a matter of bare possibility, there was no possibility whatever of getting farther upthe cliffs had never been scaled, and they were not destined to be scaled now. And so, as the twilight deepened, and the precarious footing became every moment

more doubtful and precarious, we had just to give up in despair.

'Wouldn't care for myself,' said the poor little fellow, my companion, bursting into tears; if it were not for my mother; but what will my mother say?' 'Wouldn't care, neither,' said I, with a heavy heart; 'but it's just back-water, and we'll get out at twelve.' We retreated together into one of the shallower and drier caves, and clearing a little spot of its rough stones, and then groping along the rocks for the dry grass, that in the spring season hangs from them in withered tufts, we formed for ourselves a most uncomfortable bed, and lay down in one another's arms. For the last few hours mountainous piles of clouds had been rising, dark and stormy in the sea-mouth, and they had flared portentously in the setting sun, and had worn, with the decline of evening, almost every meteoric tint of anger, from fiery red to a sombre thunderous brown, and from sombre brown to doleful black, and we could now, at least, hear what they portended, though we could no longer see. The rising wind began to howl mournfully amid the cliffs, and the sea, hitherto so silent, to beat heavily against the shore, and to boom, like distress-guns, from the recesses of the two deep-sea caves. We could hear, too, the beating rain, now heavier, now lighter, as the gusts swelled or sank; and the intermittent patter of the streamlet over the deeper cave, now driving against the precipices, now descending heavily on the stones.

My companion had only the real evils of the case to deal with, and so, the hardness of our bed and the coldness of the night considered, he slept tolerably well, but I was unlucky enough to have evils greatly worse. than the real ones to annoy me. The corpse of a seaman

had been found on the beach about a month previous, some forty yards from where we lay. The hands and feet, miserably contracted, and corrugated into deep folds at every joint, yet swollen to twice their proper size, had been bleached as white as pieces of alumed sheepskin, and where the head should have been, there existed only a sad mass of decay. I had examined the body, as young people are apt to do, a great deal too curiously for my peace; and though I had never done the poor nameless seaman any harm, I could not have suffered more from him during that melancholy night had I been his murderer. Sleeping or waking, he was continually before me. Every time I dropped into a dose, he would come stalking up the beach, from the spot where he had lain, with his stiff white fingers, that stuck out like eagle's toes, and his pale, broken pulp of a head, and attempt to strike me; and then I would awaken with a start, cling to my companion, and remember that the drowned sailor had lain festering among the identical bunches of sea-weed that still rotted on the beach not a stone-cast away. The near neighbourhood of a score of living bandits, would have inspired less horror than the recollection of that one dead

seaman.

Towards midnight the sky cleared, and the wind fell, and the moon in her last quarter rose red as a mass of heated iron out of the sea. We crept down in the uncertain light, over the rough slippery crags, to ascertain whether the tide had not fallen sufficiently far to yield us a passage, but we found the waves chafing among the rocks, just where the tide-line had rested twelve hours before, and a full fathom of sea enclasping the base of the promontory. A glimmering idea

of the real nature of our situation at length crossed my mind. It was not imprisonment for a tide, to which we had consigned ourselves; it was imprisonment for a week. There was little comfort in the thought, arising, as it did, amid the chills and terrors of a dreary midnight, and I looked wistfully on the sea as our only path of escape. There was a vessel crossing the wake of the moon at the time, scarce half a mile from the shore, and assisted by my companion, I began to shout at the top of my lungs, in the hope of being heard by the sailors. We saw her dim bulk falling slowly athwart the red glittering belt of light that had rendered her visible, and then disappearing in the murky blackness; and just as we lost sight of her for ever, we could hear an indistinct sound mingling with the dash of the waves the shout, in reply, of the startled helmsman. The vessel, as we afterwards learned, was a large stone-lighter, deeply laden, and unfurnished with a boat; nor were her crew at all sure that it would have been safe to attend to the midnight voice from amid the rocks, even had they the means of communication with the shore. We waited on and on, however, now shouting by turns, and now shouting together, but there was no second reply; and at length losing hope, we groped our way back to our comfortless bed, just as the tide had again turned on the beach, and the waves began to roll upwards, higher and higher at every dash.

As the moon rose and brightened, the dead seaman became less troublesome, and I had succeeded in dropping as soundly asleep as my companion, when we were both aroused by a loud shout. We started up, and again crept downwards among the crags to the shore,

and as we reached the sea, the shout was repeated. It was that of at least a dozen harsh voices united. There was a brief pause, followed by another shout, and then two boats, strongly manned, shot round the western promontory, and shouted yet again. The whole town had been alarmed by the intelligence that two little boys had straggled away in the morning to the rocks of the southern Sutor, and had not found their way back. The precipices had been a scene of frightful accidents from time immemorial, and it was at once inferred that one other sad accident had been added to the number. True, there were cases remembered of people having been tide-bound, in the Doocot caves, and not much worse in consequence, but as the caves were inaccessible even during neaps, we could not, it was said, possibly be in them; and the sole remaining ground of hope was, that as had happened once before, only one of the two had been killed, and that the survivor was lingering among the rocks, afraid to come home. And in this belief, when the moon rose, and the surf fell, the two boats had been fitted out. It was late in the morning ere we reached Cromarty, but a crowd on the beach awaited our arrival; and there were anxious-looking lights glancing in the windows, thick and manifold; nay, such was the interest elicited, that some enormously bad verse, in which the writer described the incident a few days after, became popular enough to be handed about in manuscript, and read at tea-parties by the élite of the town.