never, since history began, has disaster come upon the coast like to
that which befell the little town of Eyemouth in the early autumn of
1881, never has loss of life so heartrending overwhelmed a small
community. Once the headquarters of smuggling on our eastern coast, and
built--as it is well known was also built a certain street of small
houses in Spittal--with countless facilities for promoting the
operations of "Free Trade," and with "bolt-holes" innumerable for the
smugglers when close pressed by gangers, Eyemouth is still a quaint
little town, huddling its strangely squeezed-up houses in narrow lanes
and wynds betwixt river and bay. There, too, as at a northern town
better known to fame than Eyemouth,

"The grey North Ocean girds it round,
And o'er the rocks, and up the bay,
The long sea-rollers surge and sound,
And still the thin and biting spray
Drives down the melancholy street."

* * * * *

Truly, in Eyemouth it is not alone spray that drives. So close a
neighbour is the protecting sea-wall to some of the houses that turn
weather-beaten backs on the bay, that at high tide during a
north-easterly gale the giant seas, breaking against the wall, burst
also clear over the houses, hurling themselves in torrents of icy water
into the street beyond. And up the width of one little street that runs
to the bay, and past its barricaded doors, you may see sometimes billows
that have overleapt the wall come charging, to ebb with angry swish and
long-drawn clatter of shingle as the waves suck back. It is a strange
sight, and it causes one to wonder what manner of men they are who dwell