The events of that most eventful Yule e’en had worked a great change in Rassmie and Hermann. They were sharp enough lads, and had made a pretty shrewd guess that their father gained his livelihood by rescuing from the deep its unlawful prey, but that he employed such criminal means for that end they never dreamed of. The appropriation of wreck was viewed, with smuggling, as a very light offence by the Shetlanders, who, at the same time, would have shrunk with horror from such crimes as those which Bartle had committed, and however little the boys might have thought of the sin against human codes of morality, they saw in all its deepest blackness the enormity of their parent’s offence against Divine laws. Therefore, as I told you, these things went a great way to work a change in the characters of the lads, adding to their hatred of sin, and taking away much that was evil in their disposition. [Illustration] But time, that never flies from the happy, nor lingers with the sad, although we often think he is cruel enough to do so; time, whose monotonous footsteps echo along the years at the same even pace, no matter how we smile or suffer; time went on, and marked another season on the tablets of eternity, and, as he traced the first lines of the coming year, he also brought back the brave old Yule. Yule came this time with glittering frost and smiling sky, quiet waves, and scarce a breath of wind, and Rassmie launched his fishing boat for a day’s excursion among the cliffs. Their home was, as usual, unbrightened by festivity, so the good lads persuaded their mother and Tronda to accompany them on the water, and the four made a pleasant, if sober, party. Tronda had seldom been upon the sea, and had seen very little of the sublime scenery so near her home, therefore she easily prevailed on her brothers to row close to the shore, that she might the better admire the varied beauty of the crags and caves. One of the latter particularly attracted Tronda’s girlish fancy, and at her desire the boat entered the rock-hewn hall, whose tinted walls gave back a thousand silvery echoes of the splashing oars. It was a vast cavern into which the boat had entered, and the further she went the wider and more extensive seemed the boundaries of that ocean home. Even Doya’s broken spirit seemed to share in the enthusiasm of the young people, whose exclamations of rapture mingled with the shrill cry of the brooding sea fowl, and the whispering of the billows. But suddenly Tronda’s voice changed to a scream of terror, and she pointed to a ledge of rock in one of the deepest recesses of the cave. There lay what at first appeared to be merely a heap of ragged clothing, but which contained too surely a human skeleton. Rassmie’s first instinct was to turn his boat and fly from the horrible sight, but his mother was quite above the vulgar fears of the ignorant, and, after she had by her quiet mien and pious words reassured her children, their