A fortnight passed away very agreeably to the boatman. Mrs. Hamilton, a fascinating young creature of very superior mental endowments, was delighted with his character and his stories:--the latter opened to her a new chapter in her favourite volume--the book of human life; and the advocate, a man of high talent and a benevolent heart, seemed to regard him with the feelings of an affectionate son. At length, however, he began to weary sadly of what he termed the life of a gentleman, and to sigh after his little smoky cottage, and “the puir auld wife.” “Just remain with us one week longer,” said the advocate, “and I shall learn in that time the result of my application. You are not now quite so active a man as when you carried me ten miles through the snow, and frightened the tall ferryman, and so I shall secure for you a passage in one of the Leith traders.” In a few days after, when the boatman was in the middle of one of his most interesting stories, and Mrs. Hamilton hugely delighted, the advocate entered the apartment, his eyes beaming with pleasure, and a packet in his hand. “This is from London,” he said, as he handed it to the lady; “it intimates to us, that ‘Alexander Wright, Customhouse boatman,’ is to retire from the service on a pension of twenty pounds per annum.”--But why dwell longer on the story? Sandy Wright parted from his kind friends, and returned to Cromarty, where he died in the spring of 1769, in the eighty-second year of his age. “Folk hae aye to learn,” he used to say, “an’, for my own pairt, I was a saxty-year-auld scholar afore I kent the meaning o’ the verse, ‘Cast thy bread on the waters, and thou shalt find it after many days.’” CHAPTER XIX. “I’ll give thee a wind.”--SHAKSPERE. [Sidenote: TARBAT NESS.] For about thirty years after the failure of the herring fishery, the population of the town of Cromarty gradually decreased. Many of the young men became sailors and went into foreign parts, from whence few of them returned. One of their number, poor Lieutenant Wright, the boatman’s son, served in the unfortunate expedition of Vernon, and left his bones under the walls of Carthagena; another, after sailing round the world with Anson, died on his passage homewards when within sight of the white cliffs of England; a third was barbarously murdered on the high seas by the notorious Captain James Lowrie. Such of the town’s-people as had made choice of the common mechanical professions, plied their respective trades in the fishing towns of the north of Scotland; and I have seen, among old family papers, letters of these emigrants written from Lerwick, Kirkwall, and Stornoway. As the population gradually decreased in this way, house after house became tenantless and fell into decay; until the main street was skirted by roofless tenements, and the town’s cross, which bears date 1578, was bounded by a stone wall on the one side, and a hawthorn hedge on the other.