“My gentrice has nothing to do with where I lie,” said I.  “I bless God I have lain hard ere now, and can do the same again with thankfulness.  While I am here, Mr. Andie, if that be your name, I will do my part and take my place beside the rest of you; and I ask you on the other hand to spare me your mockery, which I own I like ill.”

He grumbled a little at this speech, but seemed upon reflection to approve it.  Indeed, he was a long-headed, sensible man, and a good Whig and Presbyterian; read daily in a pocket Bible, and was both able and eager to converse seriously on religion, leaning more than a little towards the Cameronian extremes.  His morals were of a more doubtful colour.  I found he was deep in the free trade, and used the ruins of Tantallon for a magazine of smuggled merchandise.  As for a gauger, I do not believe he valued the life of one at half-a-farthing.  But that part of the coast of Lothian is to this day as wild a place, and the commons there as rough a crew as any in Scotland.

One incident of my imprisonment is made memorable by a consequence it had long after.  There was a warship at this time stationed in the Firth, the Seahorse, Captain Palliser.  It chanced she was cruising in the month of September, plying between Fife and Lothian, and sounding for sunk dangers.  Early one fine morning she was seen about two miles to east of us, where she lowered a boat, and seemed to examine the Wildfire Rocks and Satan’s Bush, famous dangers of that coast.  And presently, after having got her boat again, she came before the wind and was headed directly for the Bass.  This was very troublesome to Andie and the Highlanders; the whole business of my sequestration was designed for privacy, and here, with a navy captain perhaps blundering ashore, it looked to become public enough, if it were nothing worse.  I was in a minority of one, I am no Alan to fall upon so many, and I was far from sure that a warship was the least likely to improve my condition.  All which considered, I gave Andie my parole of good behaviour and obedience, and was had briskly to the summit of the rock, where we all lay down, at the cliff’s edge, in different places of observation and concealment.  The Seahorse came straight on till I thought she would have struck, and we (looking giddily down) could see the ship’s company at their quarters and hear the leadsman singing at the lead.  Then she suddenly wore and let fly a volley of I know not how many great guns.  The rock was shaken with the thunder of the sound, the smoke flowed over our heads, and the geese rose in number beyond computation or belief.  To hear their screaming and to see the twinkling of their wings, made a most inimitable curiosity:  and I suppose it was after this somewhat childish pleasure that Captain Palliser had come so near the Bass.  He was to pay dear for it in time.  During his approach I had the opportunity to make a remark upon the rigging of that ship by which I ever after knew it miles away; and this was a means (under Providence) of my averting from a friend a great calamity, and inflicting on Captain Palliser himself a sensible disappointment.