For three weeks the _Anne_ was becalmed upon the Banks. They were surrounded by a dense fog, which hid even the water from their sight, while the beams of sun and moon failed to penetrate the white vapour which closed them in on every side. It was no longer a pleasure to pace the deck in the raw damp air and drizzling rain, which tamed even the little tailor's aspiring soul, and checked the merry dancers and the voice of mirth. Flora retreated to the cabin, and read all the books in the little cupboard at her bed-head. A "Life of Charles XII. of Sweden," an odd volume of "Pamela," and three of "The Children of the Abbey" comprised the Captain's library. What could she do to while away the lagging hours? She thought, and re-thought--at length, she determined to weave some strange incidents, which chance had thrown in her way, into a story, that might divert her mind from dwelling too much upon the future, and interest her husband. So unpacking her writing-desk, she set to work; and in the next Chapter we give to our readers the tale which Flora Lyndsay wrote at sea. CHAPTER VII. NOAH COTTON. THE WIDOW GRIMSHAWE AND HER NEIGHBOURS. On the road to ----, a small seaport town on the east coast of England, there stood in my young days an old-fashioned, high-gabled, red brick cottage. The house was divided into two tenements, the doors opening in the centre of the building. A rustic porch shaded the entrance to the left from the scorching rays of the sun, and the clouds of dust which during the summer months rose from the public road in front. Some person, whose love of nature had survived amidst the crushing cares of poverty, had twined around the rude trelliswork the deliciously fragrant branches of the brier-rose, which, during the months of June and July, loaded the air with its sweet breath. The door to the right, although unmarked by sign or chequer-board, opened into a low hedge-tavern of very ill repute, well known through the country by the name of the "Brig's Foot," which it derived from its near proximity to the bridge that crossed the river--a slow-moving, muddy stream, whose brackish waters seemed to have fallen asleep upon their bed of fat, black ooze, while creeping onward to the sea, through a long flat expanse of dreary marshes. The "Brig's Foot" was kept by the Widow Mason and her son, both persons of notoriously bad character. The old man had been killed a few months before in a drunken brawl with some smugglers; and his name was held in such ill odour that his ghost was reported to haunt the road leading to C---- churchyard, which formed the receptacle, but it would seem not the resting-place, of the dead.