“Spare me, Hugh Anderson!” said Sir John, “spare me!--do not, I implore you, add to the anguish of this miserable night!” They walked together in silence to where the waves barred their further progress, and then returned to the top of the precipice. The search was renewed in the morning, but as ineffectually as on the preceding night--there was no trace of the body. Seasons passed away; Sir John, as has been already related, perished by his own act; Episcopacy fell; and Hugh Anderson, now a greyheaded elderly man, was reappointed, after the lapse of more than thirty years, to his old charge, the parish of Cromarty. He had quitted it amid the snow-wreaths of a severe and boisterous winter; he returned to it after a storm of wind and snow from the sea had heaped the beach with wrack and tangle, and torn their mantles of ivy from some of the higher precipices. He revisited with anxious solicitude the well-remembered haunts endeared to him by so many fond, yet mournful recollections--Mary’s favourite walks--the cliffs which he had so often scaled with Dallas--and the path which he had descended in the darkness with the hapless Sir John. He paused at the foot of the precipice--the storm had swept fiercely over its iron forehead, and an immense bush of ivy, that had fallen from the ledge of the _apple-yardie_, lay withering at its base. His eye caught something of unusual appearance amid the torn and broken foliage--it was a human skull, bleached white by the rains and the sunshine of many seasons, and a few disjointed and fractured bones lay scattered near it. Painfully did he gather them up, and painfully scooping out with his pointed stick a hollow in the neighbouring bank, he shed, as he covered them up from the sight, the last tears that have fallen to the memory of the lost Dallas Urquhart. CHAPTER X. “A mighty good sort of man.”--BONNEL THORNTON. [Sidenote: THE CURATES.]