The sea-town of Portlossie was as irregular a gathering of small cottages as could be found on the surface of the globe. They faced every way, turned their backs and gables every way--only of the roofs could you predict the position; were divided from each other by every sort of small, irregular space and passage, and looked like a national assembly debating a constitution. Close behind the Seaton, as it was called, ran a highway, climbing far above the chimneys of the village to the level of the town above. Behind this road, and separated from it by a high wall of stone, lay a succession of heights and hollows covered with grass. In front of the cottages lay sand and sea. The place was cleaner than most fishing-villages, but so closely built, so thickly inhabited, and so pervaded with “a very ancient and fish-like smell,” that but for the besom of the salt north wind it must have been unhealthy. Eastward the houses could extend no further for the harbour, and westward no further for a small river that crossed the sands to find the sea--discursively and merrily at low water, but with sullen, submissive mingling when banked back by the tide. Avoiding the many nets extended long and wide on the grassy sands, the youth walked through the tide-swollen mouth of the river, and passed along the front of the village until he arrived at a house, the small window in the seaward gable of which was filled with a curious collection of things for sale--dusty-looking sweets in a glass bottle; ginger-bread cakes in the shape of large hearts, thickly studded with sugar-plums of rainbow colours, invitingly poisonous; strings of tin covers for tobacco-pipes, overlapping each other like fish-scales; toys, and tapes, and needles, and twenty other kinds of things, all huddled together. Turning the corner of this house, he went down the narrow passage between it and the next, and in at its open door. But the moment it was entered it lost all appearance of a shop, and the room with the tempting window showed itself only as a poor kitchen with an earthen floor. “Weel, hoo did the pipes behave themsels the day, daddy?” said the youth as he strode in. “Och, she’ll pe peing a coot poy to-day,” returned the tremulous voice of a grey-headed old man, who was leaning over a small peat-fire on the hearth, sifting oatmeal through the fingers of his left hand into a pot, while he stirred the boiling mess with a short stick held in his right.