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.