In a few hours the fisherman awoke from his troubled sleep, which many expected would have been the sleep of death. He raised himself in the bed—he looked around wistfully. Agnes, who had recovered, and returned to the room, fell upon his bosom. “My Agnes!—my poor Agnes!” he cried, gazing wistfully in her face—“but, where—where am I?—and my bairnies, where are they?”
“Here, faither, here!” cried the children, stretching out their little arms to embrace him.
Again he looked anxiously around. A recollection of the past, and a consciousness of the present, fell upon his mind. “Thank God!” he exclaimed, and burst into tears; and when his troubled soul and his agitated bosom had found in them relief, he inquired, eagerly—“But, oh, tell me, how was I saved?”
“John,” said the aged elder, the father of Agnes, “ye was saved by the merciful and sustaining power o’ that Providence which ye this morning set at nought. But I rejoice to find that your heart is not hardened, and that the awful visitation which has this day filled our coast with widows and with orphans, has not fallen upon you in vain; for ye acknowledge your guilt, and are grateful for your deliverance. Your being saved is naething short o’ a miracle. We a’ beheld how long and how desperately ye struggled wi’ the raging waves. A scream burst upon my ear—a woman rushed through the crowd—and then, John!—oh, then!”—— But here the feelings of the old man overpowered him. He sobbed aloud, and pausing for a few moments, added—“Tell him, some o’ ye.”
The preacher took up the tale. “Hearken unto me, John Crawford,” said he. “Ye have reason, this day, to sorrow, and to rejoice, and to be grateful beyond measure. In the morning, ye mocked my counsel and set at nought my reproof; and as ye sowed so have ye reaped. But, as your faither-in-law has told ye, when your face was recognised from the shore, and your name mentioned, a woman screamed—she rushed through the multitude—she plunged into the boiling sea, and in an instant she was beyond the reach of help!”
“Speak!—speak on!” cried the fisherman eagerly; and he placed his hands on his heaving bosom, and gazed anxiously, now towards the preacher, and again towards his Agnes, who wept upon his shoulder.
“The Providence that had till then sustained you, while your fellow creatures perished around you,” added the clergyman, “supported her. She reached you—she grasped your arm. After long struggling, she brought you within a few yards of the shore; a wave overwhelmed you both and cast you upon the beach, with her arm—the arm of your wife that saved you—upon your bosom!”
“Gracious Heaven!” exclaimed the fisherman, pressing his wife to his bosom—“my ain Agnes!—was it you?—was it you?—my wife!—my saviour!” And he wept aloud, and his children wept also.
But the feelings of the wife and the mother were too strong for words. I will not dwell upon the joy and gratitude of the family to whom the husband and the father had been restored as from the dead. It found a sorrowful contrast in the voice of lamentation and of mourning, which echoed along the coast like the peal of an alarm-bell. The dead were laid in heaps upon the beach, and, on the following day, widows, orphans, parents, and brothers, came from all the fishing towns along the coast, to seek their dead amongst the drowned that had been gathered together; or, if they found them not, they wandered along the shore to seek for them where the sea might have cast them forth. Such is the tale of the Sabbath wrecks—of the lost drave of Dunbar.
END OF VOL. VI.