It was a black hour for Archibald Campbell of Gorromalt in Strathglas, and for his wife and for Morag their second daughter, when the word came that Muireall had the sorrow of sorrows. What is pain, and is death a thing to fear? But there is a sorrow that no man can have and yet go free for evermore of a shadow upon his brow: and there is a sorrow that no woman can have and keep the moonshine in her eyes. And when a woman has this sorrow, it saves or mars her: though, for sure, none of us may discern just what that saving may be, or from whom or what, or what may be that bitter or sweet ruin. We are shaped as clay in the potter’s hand: ancient wisdom, that we seldom learn till the hand is mercifully still, and the vessel, finished for good or evil, is broken. It is a true saying that memory is like the sea-weed when the tide is in--but the tide ebbs. Each frond, each thick spray, each fillicaun or pulpy globe, lives lightly in the wave: the green water is full of strange rumour, of sea-magic and sea-music: the hither flow and thither surge give continuity and connection to what is fluid and dissolute. But when the ebb is far gone, and the wrack and the weed lie sickly in the light, there is only one confused intertangled mass. For most of us, memory is this tide-left strand: though for each there are pools, or shallows which even the ebb does not lick up in its thirsty way depthward,--narrow overshadowed channels to which we have the intangible clues. But for me there will never be any ebb-tide of memory, of one black hour, and one black day.