excellence in one happily descriptive phrase, when he remarks that Captain Soutar had landed ’the small stores and nine casks of oil with all the activity of A smuggler.’  And it was one thing to land, another to get on board again.  I have here a passage from the diary, where it seems to have been touch-and-go.  ’I landed at Tarbetness, on the eastern side of the point, in a mere gale or blast of wind from west-south-west, at 2 p.m.  It blew so fresh that the captain, in a kind of despair, went off to the ship, leaving myself and the steward ashore.  While I was in the light-room, I felt it shaking and waving, not with the tremor of the Bell Rock, but with the waving of A tree!  This the light-keepers seemed to be quite familiar to, the principal keeper remarking that “it was very pleasant,” perhaps meaning interesting or curious.  The captain worked the vessel into smooth water with admirable dexterity, and I got on board again about 6 p.m. from the other side of the point.’  But not even the dexterity of Soutar could prevail always; and my grandfather must at times have been left in strange berths and with but rude provision.  I may instance the case of my father, who was storm-bound three days upon an islet, sleeping in the uncemented and unchimneyed houses of the islanders, and subsisting on a diet of nettle-soup and lobsters.

The name of Soutar has twice escaped my pen, and I feel I owe him a vignette.  Soutar first attracted notice as mate of a praam at the Bell Rock, and rose gradually to be captain of the Regent.  He was active, admirably skilled in his trade, and a man incapable of fear.  Once, in London, he fell among a gang of confidence-men, naturally deceived by his rusticity and his prodigious accent.  They plied him with drink—­a hopeless enterprise, for Soutar could not be made drunk; they proposed cards, and Soutar would not play.  At last, one of them, regarding him with a formidable countenance, inquired if he were not frightened?  ‘I’m no’ very easy fleyed,’ replied the captain.  And the rooks withdrew after some easier pigeon.  So many perils shared, and the partial familiarity of so many voyages, had given this man a stronghold in my grandfather’s estimation; and there is no doubt but he had the art to court and please him with much hypocritical skill.  He usually dined on Sundays in the cabin.  He used to come down daily after dinner for a glass of port or whisky, often in his full rig of sou’-wester, oilskins, and long boots; and I have often heard it described how insinuatingly he carried himself on these appearances, artfully combining the extreme of deference with a blunt and seamanlike demeanour.  My father and uncles, with the devilish penetration of the boy, were far from being deceived; and my father, indeed, was favoured with an object-lesson not to be mistaken.  He had crept one rainy night into an apple-barrel