It is now nearly a hundred and twenty years since honest John Reid, the Cromarty shipmaster, was positively the most unhappy man in the place. He was shrewd, sensible, calculating, good-humoured, in comparatively easy circumstances, and at this time in his thirtieth year. The early part of his life had been spent abroad; he had voyaged over the wide Pacific, and traded to China and both the Indies; and to such purpose--for he was quite the sort of person one would most like to have for one’s grandfather--that in about fourteen years after sailing from Cromarty a poor ship-boy, he had returned to it with money enough to purchase a fine large sloop, with which he engaged in the lucrative trade carrying on at this period between Holland and the northern ports of Scotland. His good luck still followed him; nor was he of the class who are ingenious in discovering imaginary misfortunes. What is more, too, he was of so cool a temperament, that when nature rendered him capable of the softer passion at all, it seemed as if she had done so by way of after-thought, and contrary to her original intention. And yet, John Reid, with all his cool prudence, and his good humour and good fortune to boot, was one of the unhappiest men in the place--and all this because he had been just paying his addresses to one of its prettiest girls. He had first seen Helen Stuart when indulging in a solitary walk on the hill of Cromarty, shortly after his return from the Indies. Helen was fully twelve years younger than himself, slightly but elegantly formed, with small regular features, and a complexion in which the purest white was blended with the most exquisite red. Never before had the sailor seen a creature half so lovely; he thought of her all the evening after, and dreamed of her all the night. But there was no corresponding impression on the other side; the maiden merely remembered that she had met in the wood with the newly-arrived shipmaster and described him to one of her companions as a strongly-built man of barely the middle size, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a set of irregular, good-humoured features, over which a tropical sun had cast its tinge of the deepest bronze. Helen was a village heiress, with a good deal of the pride of beauty in her composition, and a very little of the pride of wealth, and, with what was perhaps as unfavourable to the newly-formed passion of Reid as either, a romantic attachment to that most perfect man of the imagination, the _maid’s husband_--a prince in disguise, the Admirable Crichton in a revised edition, or the hero of an old ballad.