"A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the
bogus 'Emigration Agencies' among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more
remote provinces of Austria. The object of these scoundrels was to get
hold of the poor ignorant people's homesteads, and they were in league
with the local usurers. They exported their victims through Hamburg
mostly. As to the ship, I had watched her out of this very window,
reaching close-hauled under short canvas into the bay on a dark,
threatening afternoon. She came to an anchor, correctly by the chart,
off the Brenzett Coastguard station. I remember before the night fell
looking out again at the outlines of her spars and rigging that stood
out dark and pointed on a background of ragged, slaty clouds like
another and a slighter spire to the left of the Brenzett church-tower.
In the evening the wind rose. At midnight I could hear in my bed the
terrific gusts and the sounds of a driving deluge.

"About that time the Coastguardmen thought they saw the lights of a
steamer over the anchoring-ground. In a moment they vanished; but it is
clear that another vessel of some sort had tried for shelter in the
bay on that awful, blind night, had rammed the German ship amidships (a
breach--as one of the divers told me afterwards--'that you could sail
a Thames barge through'), and then had gone out either scathless or
damaged, who shall say; but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal, to
perish mysteriously at sea. Of her nothing ever came to light, and yet
the hue and cry that was raised all over the world would have found her
out if she had been in existence anywhere on the face of the waters.

"A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy silence as of a neatly
executed crime, characterise this murderous disaster, which, as you may
remember, had its gruesome celebrity. The wind would have prevented the
loudest outcries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no