who perished along this coast in that hurricane was one hundred and
eighty-nine.

Will the terror of that time ever be forgotten, or its horror wiped out
from the town of Eyemouth? In the face of disaster such as that, smaller
happenings appear for the time almost insignificant. Yet it was but the
other year that another great gale on that coast brought disaster most
pitiful. A Danish steamer, feeling her way to the Firth of Forth in
weather thick with fog and with a great gale blowing, mistaking her
position, came creeping in the darkness close in to the little village
of St. Abb's. Nearer and nearer to the people, snug in their warm,
well-lit houses, came the roar of her fog-horn. And then, from the
neighbourhood of a treacherous rock--awash at low water--and little more
than a stone's throw from the village houses, there rushed up a rocket,
and a flare was seen dimly burning. In the heavy sea, the steamer had
brought her bows with a mighty crash on to that sunken rock, and there
she lay, the great seas sweeping her from stem to stern. Rockets from
the cliff that overlooked the wreck could not reach her in that fierce
wind; the life-boat, when it arrived from Berwick, could not live in the
broken water near to her. All was done that man could do to rescue the
perishing men in that hapless vessel; but that "all" in the end amounted
to just nothing. Helpless, the watchers listened with sick hearts to the
cries of her doomed crew and to the deep baying of a great hound that
was on board the doomed ship; helpless, they gazed in impotent agony at
the despairing signals made. In the morning she was still there, but the
cries were fainter, the faces seen fewer, the vessel more often buried
under breaking seas. Then the cries ceased. And when daylight came a
second time, where the hull had been there was now but white, raging
water, and seas that spouted high in air from a black rock that showed
its cruel head at intervals. And of the crew there was found no sign.