After clearing the bay, however, their progress was much impeded by adverse currents; there came on a chill drizzling rain, and the wind, which was evidently rising, began, after veering about oftener than once, to blow right ahead, and to raise a short tumbling sea. Grief of itself is cold and comfortless, and the widow, wrapped up in her cloak, sat shivering in the bottom of the yawl, drenched by the rain and the spray. But she thought only of her son and her husband. The boatmen toiled incessantly till evening; and when night came on, dark and boisterous, they were still two long miles from their landing-place--the effluence of the Nairn. Directly across the mouth of the river there runs a low dangerous bar, and as they approached they could hear the roaring of the breakers above all the hoarse sighings of the wind, and the dash of the lesser waves that were bursting around them. “There,” said the saddler, as his eye caught a few faint lights that seemed twinkling along the beach; “there is the town of Nairn right abreast of us; but has not the tide fallen too low for our attempting the bar?” The boatmen replied in the negative, and in a minute after they were among the breakers. For a single instant the skiff seemed riding on the crest of an immense wave, which came rolling from the open sea, and which, as it folded over and burst into foam, dashed her forward like an arrow from the string. She sank, however, as it receded, till her keel grated against the bar beneath. Another huge wave came rolling behind, and, curling its white head like the former, rushed over her stern, filling her at once to the gunwale, and at the same instant propelling her into the deep water within. The saddler sprang from his seat, and raising his aunt to the hinder thwart, and charging her to hold fast, he shouted to the boatmen to turn the boat’s head to the shore. In a few minutes after, they had landed.