engaged a Portuguese cook, and to this man, as
one link in a chain of causes, the loss of the
vessel might be ascribed. He had been wounded
in a street quarrel the night before the vessel
sailed from Rio, and lay disabled and useless in
his cabin throughout the homeward voyage. At
Falmouth, whither they were bound for orders,
the cook died. The captain and all the crew,
except the cabin-boy, went ashore to attend the
funeral. During their absence the boy, handling
in his curiosity the barometer, had broken the
tube, and the whole of the quicksilver had run
out. Had this instrument, the pulse of the
storm, been preserved, the crew would have
received warning of the sudden and unexpected
hurricane, and might have stood out to sea.
Whereas, they were caught in the chops of the
Channel, and thus, by this small incident, the
vessel and the mariners found their fate on the
rocks of a remote headland in my lonely parish.
I caused Le Daine to relate in detail the closing
events.

"We received orders," he said, "at Falmouth
to make for Gloucester to discharge. The
captain, and mate, and another of the crew,
were to be married on their return to their
native town. They wrote, therefore, to Arbroath
from Falmouth, to announce their safe arrival
there from their two years' voyage, their intended
course to Gloucester, and their hope in about a
week to arrive at Arbroath for welcome there."

But in a day or two after this joyful letter,
there arrived in Arbroath a leaf torn out of my
pocket-book, and addressed "To the Owners of
the Vessel," with the brief and thrilling tidings
written by myself in pencil, that I wrote among
the fragments of their wrecked vessel, and that
the whole crew, except one man, were lost "upon
my rocks." My note spread a general dismay
in Arbroath, for the crew, from the clannish
relationship among the Scotch, were connected
with a large number of the inhabitants. But to
return to the touching details of Le Daine.

"We rounded the Land's End," he said,
"that night all well, and came up Channel with
a fair wind. The captain turned in. It was my
watch. All at once, about nine at night, it
began to blow in one moment as if the storm
burst out by signal; the wind went mad; our
canvas burst in bits. We reeved fresh sails;
they went also. At last we were under bare
poles. The captain had turned out when the
storm began. He sent me forward to look out
for Lundy Light. I saw your cliff." (This was
a bluff and broken headland just by the southern
boundary of my own glebe.) "I sung out, Land.
I had hardly done so when she struck with a
blow, and stuck fast. Then the captain sung
out, 'All hands to the maintop,' and we all went
up. The captain folded his arms, and stood by,
silent."

Here I asked him, anxious to know how they
expressed themselves in such a time, "But what
was said afterwards, Le Daine?"

"Not one word, sir; only once, when the
long boat went over, I said to the skipper, 'Sir,
the boat is gone.' But he made no answer."

How accurate was Byron's painting:
Then shrieked the timid, and stood still the brave.

"At last there came on a dreadful wave, mast-top
high, and away went the mast by the board,
and we with it, into the sea. I gave myself up.
I was the only man on the ship that could not
swim, so where I fell in the water there I lay.
I felt the waves beat me and send me on. At
last there was a rock under my hand. I clung
on. Just then I saw Alick Kant, one of our
crew, swimming past. I saw him lay his hand
on a rock, and I sung out, 'Hold on, Alick!'
but a wave rolled and swept him away, and I
never saw his face more. I was beaten onward
and onward among the rocks and the tide, and at
last I felt the ground with my feet. I scrambled
on. I saw the cliff, steep and dark, above my
head. I climbed up until I reached a kind of
platform with grass, and there I fell down flat
upon my face, and either I fainted away or I
fell asleep. There I lay a long time, and when
I awoke it was just the break of day. There
was a little yellow flower just under my head,
and when I saw that I knew I was on dry land."
This was a plant of the Bird's-foot clover, called
in old times Our Lady's Finger. He went on:
"I could see no house or sign of people, and
the country looked to me like some wild and
desert island. At last I felt very thirsty, and I
tried to get down towards a valley where I
thought I should find water. But before I
could reach it I fell and grew faint again, and
there, thank God, sir, you found me."

Such was Le Daine's sad and simple story,
and no one could listen unmoved or without a
strong feeling of interest and compassion for the
poor solitary survivor of his shipmates and crew.
The coroner arrived, held his 'quest, and the
usual verdict of "Wrecked and cast ashore,"
empowered me to inter the dead sailors, found
and future, from the same vessel, with the
service in the Prayer Book for the Burial of the
Dead. This decency of sepulture is the result
of a somewhat recent statute, passed in the
reign of George the Third. Before that time,
it was the common usage of the coast to dig,
just above high-water mark, a pit on the shore,
and therein to cast, without inquest or religious
rite, the carcases of shipwrecked men. My
first funeral of these lost mariners was a touching
and striking scene. The three bodies first
found were buried at the same time. Behind
the coffins, as they were solemnly borne along
the aisle, walked the solitary mourner, Le Daine,
weeping bitterly and aloud. Other eyes were
moist, for who could hear unsoftencd the greeting
of the Church to these strangers from the
sea? and the "touch that makes the whole
earth kin," in the hope we breathed that we,
too, might one day "rest as these our brethren
did"? It was well-nigh too much for those who
served that day. Nor was the interest subdued
when, on the Sunday after the wreck, at the
appointed place in the service, just before the
General Thanksgiving, Le Daine rose up from
his place, approached the altar, and uttered in