“The Johnnie Faws moved restlessly up and down the village; but most of them gathered at the ‘Dotterel,’ though they drank nothing. The greater part of the time they were silent, but occasionally they all talked at once in their own tongue; and I dare say we shouldn’t have had any tidings of Portsannet at all if the group about the door of the ‘Dotterel’ hadn’t quarrelled, or seemed to. It was something about a slipper-brake. It appeared that one of their men, Osa Couper, had turned down into Portsannet earlier in the day, before the storm had got quite so bad, to get a new hook or rivet for this brake. He had promised to overtake them; but (they said) somewhere over yonder--over the Heights--a man with a pair of long wooden runners on his feet (it was Andrews, we learned afterwards, mate of an old Norwegian timber-barque, turned farmer)--Andrews--had suddenly appeared among them from nowhere in particular,--just dropped in on them from out of the smothering white, and had advised them to avoid the shelter of the hollows: the hollows, you see, were drifted, but the short brown grass showed on the tops. Then Andrews had reported that a tall, Egyptian-looking fellow had flung himself into the Portsannet boat as she had put forth for the second time that morning; and then all at once the Johnnie Faws had missed him. He had seemed to vanish while they had all thought he was talking to Osa Couper’s woman yonder.... Of course we asked again if it was the _Lizzie Martin_ they had put out for; but they didn’t know. “You know what South Ness is like,--houses at all levels, and how you can step from the door of Broadwood’s house yonder almost on to the ‘Dotterel’ chimneys. Well, if the Heights were swept, we had the sweepings. We were blocked with snow up to the chamber windows,--the bedroom windows,--and there was right of way through anybody’s yard or passage or kitchen that was convenient. I remember it interested me (perhaps it won’t interest you) the way the wind seemed to have been deflected from the houses in a sort of backwash. It had made great scoops and trenches, ten foot high and clean-cut at the edges, as if shaped in marble; and men and women passed up and down these trenches. These cliffs, as you might call them, darkened the interiors of the cottages; and the wind hooted in the chimneys just as lads blow across the barrel of a key. Farmers with shovels, frozen over white as snow men, returned from digging out their cattle, but the fishermen idled moodily. The cobles and smacks tossed down in the harbour; but the wind drowned most noises except that of the surf away out on the Spit, and that was like continuous explosions. This was only midday, you know, but you could see nothing but white--white; bits of ice like diamonds on your lashes; and here and there a bit of blue or apple-green sky, all tossed together. I thought I had never seen anything so wild and beautiful; but then, I hadn’t a _Lizzie Martin_ out....”