A cheerful fire burned on the hearth of Jamie Gair, the fisherman of Broughty-point, and it seemed to burn brighter as evening deepened on the land and sea. The cottage, which stood within a kail-yard, the gate of which was a pair of whale jaw-bones, consisted of a butt and a ben,--_i.e._, an outer and inner apartment,--the latter, serving as a kitchen, had a floor of hard-beaten clay; the walls were lined with wood, and in the rafters were a vast quantity of lumber, boat-gear, oars, sails, fishing-creels, bladders, floats, and other apparatus stowed away aloft. Half of a cart-wheel felloe formed a fender (such as we may yet see in Scottish cottages), but the fire of bog-fir was blazing on the hearthstone, for iron grates were then an article of splendour and luxury. On the wooden shelf above the fireplace stood a little image of St. Clement, the mariner's patron, with the anchor of his martyrdom hung about his neck; and on the back of the door a horseshoe was nailed, with a sprig of rowan-tree, the usual precaution against witchcraft. From a rafter an egg was suspended by a rope-yarn. This was the _babys-egg_, the first laid by a pullet, the gift of its granny, and carefully preserved, as a source of good fortune to it in after life. By the bright red light of the fire (which shone through a little window upon the waters of the ferry) Jamie Gair sat mending his nets, and affixing various large brown bladders thereto. A red night-cap was placed jauntily on his round curly head; the sleeves of his blue flannel-shirt were rolled up to the elbows, displaying his brawny arms, and, where his thick beard and whiskers did not conceal it, his face was browned to the hue of mahogany by exposure to the weather. Mary, his wife, a buxom dame of six-and-twenty, wearing one of those long-eared coifs, which are still worn by old women in the Lowlands, and a short skirted jacket, was fondling their son and heir, a baby about a year old, to which she was merrily _lilting_ in that manner peculiar to the women of Scotland, when a song is hummed and half sung, while a dish of stappit-haddie (_i.e._, a haddock stuffed with oatmeal, onions, and pepper), broiled before the fire, for breakfast next morning, as Jamie had to start early, and now sat late in the preparation of his nets.