We fared hard and worked hard; for no more industrious folk lived in the fisher-town of Kirk Leslie, a pleasant and goodly spot, lying not far from the East Neuk of Fife, than old Davie Lindsay and Jess, his wife and my mother. Many a weary night and day have come and gone since I beheld that beach whereon I was born; but I can yet shut my eyes and see our cottage and our boat—called the “Royal Thistle”—rocking at the lee of the long rough pier of unhewn whinstone, gathered from the wild muirs around, which ran into the sea and sheltered the little fisher harbour, formed by the burn of Balwearie, where it joins the waters of its black pools to the salt brine. Opposite our house was a pretty green bourock, as we called it, that is to say, a little hill, mostly of bright green turf, with bunches of bent and long grass, which rustled with a sharp sad sound when the east wind blew snell, and creeping cosily into the chimney neuk, we would listen to the roaring of the sea. But the bourock was oftentimes brown with nets or with wet sails stretched there to dry, and below it there lay half-buried in the sand, old boats, mouldering away and masts and oars all shivered, bleaching like big bones in the sun and the rain. I remember old Davie Lindsay my father well. He was a stern, big man, with a grisly grey beard, shaved but once a month. No fisher on the coast had a surer hand for the tiller, or a firmer gripe to haul aft the sheet of the lugsail in a fresh breeze and a gathering sea. Often when we were rising and falling on the easterly swell, half-a-score miles from Kirk Leslie pier, he loved to tell me old-world tales and sing old-world songs of the sea. Then would he recount how the Rover sunk the bell which good abbot Ignatius, of Aberbrothwick, caused to be placed upon the wild Bell Rock, as a guide to poor mariners; and how the pirate dreed the weird—that is, underwent the fate—he had prepared for himself, and was lost with ship and crew on that very reef. Sometimes, too, he would drop his voice, and when I came close to him, he would speak of great monsters in the sea; of the ocean snake, whose head looked up at the bridge of Stirling, and whose tail went nine times round the Bass; of singing mermaids, who come upon the yellow sands at night, and beguile men with their false lays, till they leave house and home, being bewitched by the glamour of elfin palaces under the brine; and, most terrible of all, of phantom ships with crews of ghosts, which sailors see by the pale glimmerings of the moon, when it shines through the driving scud, upon a mirk midnight and a roaring sea. But, then, if I was frightened and cried, my father would straightway change the theme, and burst out with a strong clear voice into some loud fishing-song, or, what I loved better still, into some brave, ancient ballad, about the fair kingdom of Scotland, and its gallant kings and stalwart knights; and of such,