The town drummer had received his dram and withdrawn, and Master Spiggot, the gudeman or landlord of the _Thane of Fife_, the principal tavern, and only inn or hostel in the burgh, was taking a last view of the main street, and considering the propriety of closing for the night. It was broad, spacious, and is still overlooked by many a tall and gable-ended mansion, whose antique and massive aspect announces that, like other Fifeshire burghs before the Union in the preceding year, it had seen better days. Indeed, the house then occupied by Master Spiggot himself, and from which his sign bearing the panoplied _Thane_ at full gallop on a caparisoned steed swung creaking in the night wind, was one of those ancient edifices, and in former days had belonged to the provost of the adjoining kirk; but this was (as Spiggot said) "in the auld warld times o' the Papistrie."
The gudeman shook his white head solemnly and sadly, as he looked down the empty thoroughfare.
"There _was_ a time," he muttered, and paused.
Silent and desolate as any in the ruins of Thebes, the street was half covered with weeds and rank grass that grew between the stones, and Spiggot could see them waving in the dim starlight.
Crail is an out-of-the-way place. It is without thoroughfare and without trade; few leave it and still fewer think of going there, for there one feels as if on the very verge of society; for there, even by day, reigns a monastic gloom, a desertion, a melancholy, a uniform and voiceless silence, broken only by the croak of the gleds and the cawing of the clamorous gulls nestling on the old church tower, while the sea booms incessantly as it rolls on the rocky beach.
But there was a time when it was otherwise; when the hum of commerce rose around its sculptured cross, and there was a daily bustle in the chambers of its Town-hall, for there a portly provost and bailies with a battalion of seventeen corpulent councillors sat solemnly deliberating on the affairs of the burgh; and swelling with a municipal importance that was felt throughout the whole East Neuk of Fife; for, in those days, the bearded Russ and red-haired Dane, the Norwayer, and the Hollander, laden with merchandise, furled their sails in that deserted harbor, where now scarcely a fisherboat is seen; for on Crail, as on all its sister towns along the coast, fell surely and heavily the terrible blight of 1707, and now it is hastening rapidly to insignificance and decay.