said the old man, “has been sounding in my ears all this morning. I have never known a life lost on the sands but that knocking has gone before.” As he spoke, a horseman was seen riding furiously along the road which skirts the opposite shore of the estuary. On reaching the usual ford, though the rise of the tide had rendered it impracticable for more than an hour before, he spurred his horse across the beach and entered the water. “Surely,” said the old man to his friend, “that madman is not taking the ford, and the sea nearly at full?” “Ay, but he is though,” said the other; “if the distance does not deceive me, it is Macculloch the corn-agent, in hot haste for the Tain market. See how he spurs through the shallows; and see, he has now reached the Pot, and the water deepens--he goes deeper, and deeper, and deeper. Merciful heavens! he is gone!” Horse and rider had sunk into one of the hollows. The horse rose to the surface a moment after, and swam to the shore; but the rider had disappeared for ever. A story of nearly the same part of the country connects the mysterious knocking with the mermaid. [Sidenote: MACCULLOCH THE CORN-AGENT.] In the immediate neighbourhood of the Old Abbey of Fearn, famous for its abbot, Patrick Hamilton, our first Protestant martyr, there stood, rather more than ninety years ago, a little turf cottage, inhabited by a widow, whose husband, a farmer of the parish, had died suddenly in the fields about ten years before. The poor woman had been within doors with her only child, a little girl of seven years of age, at the time; and when, without previous preparation, she had opened the door on a hurried summons, and seen the corpse of her husband on the threshold, her mind was totally unhinged by the shock. For the ten following years she went wandering about like a ghost, scarce conscious apparently of anything; no one ever heard her speak, or saw her listen; and save that she retained a few of the mechanical neatnesses of her earlier years--which, standing out alone on a groundwork of vacuity, seemed akin to the instincts of the inferior animals--her life appeared to be nearly as much a blank as that of the large elm-tree which stretched its branches over her cottage. Her husband’s farm, shortly after his death, had been put into the hands of a relation of the family, a narrow sordid man who had made no generous use, it was thought, of the power which the imbecility of the poor woman and the youth of her daughter gave him over their affairs; it was at least certain that he became comparatively wealthy, and they very poor; and in the autumn of 1742, the daughter, now a pretty girl of seventeen, had to leave her mother on the care of a neighbour, and to engage as a reaper with a farmer in the neighbouring parish of Tarbat. She had gone with a heavy heart to work for the first time among strangers, but her youth and beauty, added to a quiet timidity of manner, that showed how conscious