The Entail; or, The Lairds of Grippy
A circumstance, however, occurred at the time, which tended materially to diminish his anxieties: A number of gentlemen belonging to the royal city had projected a sea excursion in Allan M'Lean's pilot-boat, and one of the party proposed to Kittlestonheugh that he should be of their party--for they were all friends, and sympathized, of course, with the most heartfelt commiseration, for the loss he had sustained in his wife, who had been nearly twenty years almost as much dead as alive, and particularly in the grief he suffered by the injudicious marriage of his daughter.