tightly on to his somewhat rusty, grizzled bob-wig. “For there’s none in these parts to nurse the sick as well as my daughter Joan.”

[11]

“And sure I’m ready to go, father!” cried the girl, who, with the nimbleness of a fawn, had darted back into the parlor and brought out her father’s case of surgical instruments, as well as a diminutive portable chest, containing such drugs and medicines as were in use at the time.

“I’ll have on my hood in a tick of the clock.”

And by the time these words were uttered she had flown up the steep, narrow staircase and disappeared round the bend at the top. The sailor, who had stepped inside the porch, out of the wind and a drizzling rain which had now begun to fall, was full of admiration and astonishment.

“Oons, sir, but ’twill be rough work for the young mistress!” said he. “The water’s washing over the boat yonder, and we shan’t be able to push off without getting wet up to the waist.”

“The lass is used to rough weather,” said[12] Parson Langney, proudly. “She’ll tell you herself that where her father can go she goes.”

[12]

The words were scarcely out of his mouth when Joan, wrapped in a rough peasant’s cloak, and wearing a loose hood, came tripping down the stairs.

Not a moment was lost. With a word to Nance, who had put in a tardy appearance, the parson, with his daughter on one side and the sailor on the other, started for the shore.

The wind was at its worst on the top of the hill where the Parsonage stood. A very few minutes’ sharp walking brought them all to a lower level, and within the shelter of a wild straggling growth of bushes and small trees, which extended in patches from the village almost to the edge of the crumbling cliffs.

Here they struck into a rough track made by the feet of the fishermen and less inoffensive characters, and before they had gone far they saw the hulk of the cutter, tossing like a little drifting spar amid the foam of the waves, and showing dark against the leaden, faint moonlight on the sea beyond. The parson asked a few questions, and elicited the usual story—a contraband cargo was being run in a little[13] creek just where the cliffs broke off and the marsh began, when the lookout man on the cutter spied the smugglers, and a boat was sent out to give chase. There 

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