He had built a bulwark in the old, lumbering, Cromarty style of the last century, and confined the wanderings of the stream by two straight walls. Across the walls he had just thrown a wooden bridge, and crowned the bulwark with a parapet, when on came the first of the storms--a night of sleet and hurricane--and lo! in the morning, the bulwark lay utterly overthrown, and the bridge, as if it had marched to its assistance, lay beside it, half buried in sea-wrack. “Ah,” exclaimed the neighbours, “it would be well for us to be as sure of our summer’s employment as Donald Miller, honest man!” Summer came; the bridge strided over the stream as before; the bulwark was built anew, and with such neatness and apparent strength, that no bulwark on the beach could compare with it. Again came winter; and the second bulwark, with its proud parapet, and rock-like strength, shared the fate of the first. Donald fairly took to his bed. He rose, however, with renewed vigour; and a third bulwark, more thoroughly finished than even the second, stretched ere the beginning of autumn between his property and the sea. Throughout the whole of that summer, from grey morning to grey evening, there might be seen on the shore of Cromarty a decent-looking, elderly man, armed with lever and mattock, rolling stones, or raising them from their beds in the sand, or fixing them together in a sloping wall--toiling as never labourer toiled, and ever and anon, as a neighbour sauntered the way, straightening his weary back, and tendering the ready snuff-box. That decent-looking, elderly man, was Donald Miller. But his toil was all in vain. Again came winter and the storms; again had he betaken himself to his bed, for his third bulwark had gone the way of the two others. With a resolution truly indomitable, he rose yet again, and erected a fourth bulwark, which has now presented an unbroken front to the storms of twenty years.