"Eagerly running along by the edge of the rocks, at a pace which, on another Sabbath, she would have thought a desecration of the day, clinging to Willie Morison's arm, and with an anxious heart, feeling her presence a kind of protection to him, Katie Stewart hastens to the Billy Ness. The gray pier of Anster is lined with anxious faces, and here and there a levelled telescope under the care of some old shipmaster attracts round it a still deeper, still more eager knot of spectators. The tide is out, and venturous lads are stealing along the sharp low ranges of rock, slipping now and then with incautious steps into the little clear pools of sea-water which surround them; for their eyes are not on their own uncertain footing, but fixed, like the rest, on that visible danger up the Firth, in which all feel themselves concerned. "Already there are spectators, and another telescope on the Billy Ness, and the whole range of 'the braes' between Anstruther and Pittenweem is dotted with anxious lookers-on; and the far away pier of Pittenweem, too, is dark with its little crowd. "What is the cause! Not far from the shore, just where that headland, which hides you from the deep indentation of Largo Bay, juts out upon the Firth, lies a little vessel, looking like a diminutive Arabian horse, or one of the aristocratic young slight lads who are its officers, with high blood, training, and courage in every tight line of its cordage and taper stretch of its masts. Before it, arrested in its way, lies a helpless merchant brig, softly swaying on the bright mid-waters of the Firth, with the cutter's boat rapidly approaching its side. "Another moment and it is boarded; a very short interval of silence, and again the officer—you can distinguish him with that telescope, by his cocked hat, and the flash which the scabbard of his sword throws on the water as he descends the vessel's side—has re-entered the cutter's boat. Heavily the boat moves through the water now, crowded with pressed men—poor writhing hearts, whose hopes of home-coming and peace have been blighted in a moment; captured, some of them, in sight of their homes, and under the anxious, straining eyes of wives and children, happily too far off to discern their full calamity. "A low moan comes from the lips of that poor woman, who, wringing her hands and rocking herself to and fro, with the unconscious movement of extreme pain, looks pitifully in Willie Morison's face, as he fixes the telescope on the scene. She is reading the changes of its expression, as if her sentence was there; but he says nothing, though the very motion of his hand, as he steadies the glass, attracts, like something of occult significance, the agonized gaze which dwells upon him.