she never appeared; but he frequently heard the tones of her voice echoing from the lower apartments, and the faint peal of her cold, unnatural laugh. One day at noon, a year after her first appearance, the old nurse was surprised to see her enter the cottage; as all her previous visits had been made early in the morning or late in the evening; whereas now,--though the day was dark and lowering, and a storm of wind and rain had just broken out,--still it _was_ day. "Mammie," she said, "I cannot open the heart of the laird, and I have nothing of my own to give you; but I think I can do something for you now. Go straight to the White House [that of a neighboring proprietor], and tell the folk there to set out with all the speed of man and horse for the black rock in the sea, at the foot of the crags, or they'll rue it dearly to their dying day. Their bairns, foolish things, have gone out to the rock, and the tide has flowed around them; and, if no help reach them soon, they'll be all scattered like sea-ware on the shore ere the fall of the sea. But if you go and tell your story at the White House, mammie, the bairns will be safe for an hour to come, and there will be something done by their mother to better you, for the news." The woman went, as directed, and told her story; and the father of the children set out on horseback in hot haste for the rock,--a low, insulated skerry, which, lying on a solitary part of the beach, far below the line of flood, was shut out from the view of the inhabited country by a wall of precipices, and covered every tide by several feet of water. On reaching the edge of the cliffs, he saw the black rock, as the woman had described, surrounded by the sea, and the children clinging to its higher crags. But, though the waves were fast rising, his attempts to ride out through the surf to the poor little things were frustrated by their cries, which so frightened his horse as to render it unmanageable; and so he had to gallop on to the nearest fishing village for a boat. So much time was unavoidably lost in consequence, that nearly the whole beach was covered by the sea, and the surf had begun to lash the feet of the precipices behind; but until the boat arrived, not a single wave dashed over the black rock; though immediately after the last of the children had been rescued, an immense wreath of foam rose twice a man's height over its topmost pinnacle.