of the sea, and diligently picking up every conceivable article of flotsam and jetsam that came in his way. In all this there was perhaps nothing to object to; but this mild specimen of a Cornish wrecker had the habit of appropriating, without compunction, such oars, thwarts, baling-dishes, and other articles of boat gearing as came in his way, even though he knew that they belonged to his neighbours, and had only been carried away from their proper places by an unusually high tide or a gale of wind. This was a breach of the etiquette and good-neighbourhood prevailing among boatmen that could not be tolerated. A Drumarbin man, therefore, who had lost some oars in a storm, and suspected that the Fort-William shore-searcher had found and kept them, determined on reprisal, and in hope of curing him of such shabby peculations, to give him a good fright, which could be done the more easily, as the shore-searcher was a nervous, timid creature, brimful of belief in apparitions, ghosts, and ghost stories of the wildest and most improbable character. Getting up one morning after a storm, the Drumarbin man put on a pair of new shoes, and slipping to the shore, unobserved by the wrecker, whom he could see wandering along the beach, as was his custom, in the grey day-break, he lay down at length on the shingle, and covered his head and body down to his ankles with the drift-ware that had been cast up by the storm. All he left exposed was his feet, on which we have said there was a pair of good substantial new shoes. Meanwhile the "wrecker" was advancing along the beach, carefully searching about, and stooping from time to time, oyster-catcher or curlew-wise, in order to pick up such waifs and strays as he fancied worth the while. At last he reached the recumbent and sea-ware-covered Drumarbin man. The shoes at once caught his eye, and as he gazed wistfully on what he considered the most fortunate and valuable jetsam that had fallen to his luck for a long time, he was heard to soliloquise,--"A drowned man! Poor fellow; but he has good shoes on, and as he can have no more use for them, I may as well take them now as anybody else later in the day." No sooner said than done. Throwing down his bundle of gatherings, he pulled the shoes evenly and steadily off the supposed "body's" feet, and was moving away with them, when a smothered sepulchral voice from under the sea-ware struck his ear--an ear painfully acute under the circumstances,--"Gabh mo chomhairl' 's fàg na brògan sin!" "Take my advice, and leave these shoes alone!" At the same time he saw the mass of drift-weed heaving and moving. Dropping the shoes as if they had suddenly become each a mass of red-hot iron in his hand, he started off with a yell that frightened the sea-birds all the way to Camus-na-Gall, and ran a terrible race without once halting or looking over his shoulder, till, penitent and breathless, he reached his own fireside. He was completely cured of shore-wandering, for,