Chapter 10

Tell me not of it, friend--when the young weep,
Their tears are luke-warm brine;--from your old eyes
Sorrow falls down like hail-drops of the North,
Chilling the furrows of our withered cheeks,
Cold as our hopes, and hardened as our feeling--
Theirs, as they fall, sink sightless--ours recoil,
Heap the fair plain, and bleaken all before us.
Old Play.

The Antiquary, being now alone, hastened his pace, which had been
retarded by these various discussions, and the rencontre which had closed
them, and soon arrived before the half-dozen cottages at Mussel-crag.
They had now, in addition to their usual squalid and uncomfortable
appearance, the melancholy attributes of the house of mourning. The boats
were all drawn up on the beach; and, though the day was fine, and the
season favourable, the chant, which is used by the fishers when at sea,
was silent, as well as the prattle of the children, and the shrill song
of the mother, as she sits mending her nets by the door. A few of the
neighbours, some in their antique and well-saved suits of black, others
in their ordinary clothes, but all bearing an expression of mournful
sympathy with distress so sudden and unexpected, stood gathered around
the door of Mucklebackit's cottage, waiting till "the body was lifted."
As the Laird of Monkbarns approached, they made way for him to enter,
doffing their hats and bonnets as he passed, with an air of melancholy
courtesy, and he returned their salutes in the same manner.

In the inside of the cottage was a scene which our Wilkie alone could
have painted, with that exquisite feeling of nature that characterises
his enchanting productions,

The body was laid in its coffin within the wooden bedstead which the
young fisher had occupied while alive. At a little distance stood the
father, whose ragged weather-beaten countenance, shaded by his grizzled
hair, had faced many a stormy night and night-like day. He was apparently
revolving his loss in his mind, with that strong feeling of painful grief
peculiar to harsh and rough characters, which almost breaks forth into
hatred against the world, and all that remain in it, after the beloved
object is withdrawn. The old man had made the most desperate efforts to
save his son, and had only been withheld by main force from renewing them
at a moment when, without the possibility of assisting the sufferer, he
must himself have perished. All this apparently was boiling in his
recollection. His glance was directed sidelong towards the coffin, as to
an object on which he could not stedfastly look, and yet from which he
could not withdraw his eyes. His answers to the necessary questions which
were occasionally put to him, were brief, harsh, and almost fierce. His