The winter was neither severe nor protracted, but to the people of Cromarty it was a season of much suffering; and with the first month of spring there came down upon them whole shoals of beggars from the upper part of the country, to implore the assistance which they were, alas! unable to render them, and to share with them in the spoils of the sea. The unfortunate paupers, mostly elderly men and women, were so modest and unobtrusive, so unlike common beggars in their costume, which in most instances was entire and neat, and so much more miserable in aspect, for they were wasted by famine, that the hearts of the people of the town bled for them. It is recorded of a farmer of the parish, whose crops did not suffer quite so much as those of his neighbours, that he prepared every morning a pot of gruel, and dealt it out by measure to the famishing strangers--giving to each the full of a small ladle. There was a widow gentlewoman, too, of the town, who imparted to them much of her little, and yet, like the widow of Zarephath, found enough in what remained. On a morning of this spring, she saw a thin volume of smoke rising from beside the wall of a corn-yard, which long before had been emptied of its last stack; and approaching it, she found that it proceeded from a little fire, surrounded by four old women, who were anxiously watching a small pot suspended over the fire by a pin fixed in the wall. Curiosity induced her to raise the lid; and as she stretched out her hand the women looked up imploringly in her face. The little pot she found about half filled with fish entrails, which had been picked up on dunghills and the shore; her heart smote her, and hastening home for a cake of bread, she divided it among the women. And never till her dying day did she forget the look which they gave her when, breaking the cake, she doled out a portion to each.