on it with difficulty owing to the action of the sea. Coaches rolled
over the frozen river, and a fair was held with booths, bear-baiting,
and bull-baiting. An ox was roasted whole on the ice. This thick ice
lasted two months. The hard year 1690 surpassed in severity even the
famous winters at the beginning of the seventeenth century, so minutely
observed by Dr. Gideon Delane--the same who was, in his quality of
apothecary to King James, honoured by the city of London with a bust and
a pedestal.

One evening, towards the close of one of the most bitter days of the
month of January, 1690, something unusual was going on in one of the
numerous inhospitable bights of the bay of Portland, which caused the
sea-gulls and wild geese to scream and circle round its mouth, not
daring to re-enter.

In this creek, the most dangerous of all which line the bay during the
continuance of certain winds, and consequently the most
lonely--convenient, by reason of its very danger, for ships in hiding--a
little vessel, almost touching the cliff, so deep was the water, was
moored to a point of rock. We are wrong in saying, The night falls; we
should say the night rises, for it is from the earth that obscurity
comes. It was already night at the bottom of the cliff; it was still day
at top. Any one approaching the vessel's moorings would have recognized
a Biscayan hooker.

The sun, concealed all day by the mist, had just set. There was
beginning to be felt that deep and sombrous melancholy which might be
called anxiety for the absent sun. With no wind from the sea, the water
of the creek was calm.