owners in the cargo, were tried and suffered
the punishment of the law. Jack Ayres
received a free pardon, and I had a passage
offered me in the next man-of-war to England,
which I accepted.

THE SEA-SIDE CHURCHYARD.

THE sea-side churchyard is a strange
witness of the perilous life of the mariner and
the fisherman. It is only by a walk in it that
we acquire a clear conception of the real
nature of that mode of livelihood which such
hundreds of thousands, all round these islands,
embrace, as a choice or a necessity. We resort
to pleasant places in the summer time, and
see the great ocean glittering and rolling in
playful majesty, and our hearts leap at the
sublime spectacle. We see white sails gleaming
on its bosom, and steamers trailing their
long clouds of smoke after them, as they
busily walk the waters, bearing joyous
passengers to many a new scene. We meet
the hardy blue-cloth sons of ocean, on the
beach and the cliff; see them pushing off
their boats lor a day's fishing, or coming in
in the early morning with their well-laden
yawls and cobbles, and the sea and its people
assume to us a holiday sort of aspect, in
which the labour, the watching, the long
endurance of cold, the peril and the death are
concealed in the picturesque of the scenery,
and the frank and calm bearing of the actors
themselves. What a different thing is even a
fisherman's life when contemplated as a whole;
when we take in the winter and the storm
to complete the picture of his existence! But,
as few of us can do this in reality, if we wish
to know the actualities of a sea-faring life, we
may get a very fair idea of them in any sea-
side churchyard.

We lately took a survey of two such on
the Yorkshire coast, and the notes which we
there and then jotted down will afford some
notion of the strange and touching records of
such a place. Our first visit was to the
churchyard of Filey, a mere village, well
known to thousands of summer tourists for
the noble extent of its sands, and the stern
magnificence of its so-called bridge, or
promontory of savage rocks running far into the
sea, on which you may walk, at low-water;
but which, with the advancing tide, becomes
savagely grand, from the fury with which the
ocean breaks over it.

In tempestuous weather this bridge is truly
a bridge of sighs to mariners, and many a
noble ship has been dashed to pieces upon it.

One of the first headstones which catches
your eye in the little quiet churchyard of
Filey bears witness to the terrors of the
bridge.—"In memory of Richard Richardson,
who was unfortunately drowned December
27th, 1799, aged forty-eight years:—

"By sudden wind and boisterous sea
The Lord did take my life from me;
But He to shore my body brought—
Found by my wife, who for it sought.
And here it rests in mother clay,
Until the Resurrection day.

"Also of Elizabeth, wife of the above, who
died January 19th, 1833, aged eighty-nine."

This fisherman was lost on the bridge, and
his wife sought his body on the bridge for
eleven weeks. She was possessed with an
immoveable persuasion that there some day she
should find him. All through that winter,
from day to day, till late in March, she
followed the receding tide, and with an earnest
eye explored every ledge and crevice of the
rocks, every inch of the wild chaos of huge
stones that storms had hurled upon the bridge,
and every wilderness of slippery and tangling
sea-weed. It was in vain that her neighbours
told her that it was hopeless; that they
assured her that she would get her death from
cold; every day the solitary watcher might
be seen, reckless of wind, or storm, or frost ;
and, at length, she did find the corpse of her
husband, and saw it consigned to "mother
clay." She must have had a frame as hardy
as her will and strong as her affections, for
she survived this strange vigil of conjugal
love thirty-four years, and to the age of nearly
ninety.

Near this stands a stone in memory of a
master-mariner and his wife, both lost, in a
severe gale, in a passage from London to
Shields; another lost on a voyage to Quebec;
and two brothers, one drowned in the Thames,
and the other perishing at Constantinople.
In the churchyard are numbers of such
records. Humble as are the epitaphs on these
graves, that hold no bodies in nine cases out
of ten, they have generally a touch of real
nature in them compared with the hacknied
lines we generally find in churchyards. One
tells us, that—

"From home he went, with mind most free,
His livelihood to gain at sea:
He ne'er returned, 'twas not to be—
He ne'er returned, 'twas God's decree.
Oh! sad to tell, a furious wave
Cast him into a watery grave—
A grave in motion—termed the deep."

A boat sinking, carved on the stone,
symbolises his fate; while opposite a lucky old
mariner has had a boat in full sail placed
on his headstone, and gives God hearty
thanks for having saved his life some dozen
times. Two disconsolate parents address us
thus:—

"Unfortunate parents tell
That this our son a victim fell.
In steering homewards they were caught,
With gust of wind upset the boat.
There three were cast into the sea,
And he launched into eternity.
He was a son both good and kind;
May he in God a Father find."

Some very philosophic friends have inscribed