time for signals of distress. It was death without any sort of fuss. The
Hamburg ship, filling all at once, capsized as she sank, and at daylight
there was not even the end of a spar to be seen above water. She was
missed, of course, and at first the Coastguardmen surmised that she
had either dragged her anchor or parted her cable some time during the
night, and had been blown out to sea. Then, after the tide turned,
the wreck must have shifted a little and released some of the bodies,
because a child--a little fair-haired child in a red frock--came ashore
abreast of the Martello tower. By the afternoon you could see along
three miles of beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in and out
of the tumbling foam, and rough-looking men, women with hard faces,
children, mostly fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and dripping, on
stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long procession past the door
of the 'Ship Inn,' to be laid out in a row under the north wall of the
Brenzett Church.

"Officially, the body of the little girl in the red frock is the first
thing that came ashore from that ship. But I have patients amongst the
seafaring population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially, I am informed
that very early that morning two brothers, who went down to look after
their cobble hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from Brenzett,
an ordinary ship's hencoop lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven
drowned ducks inside. Their families ate the birds, and the hencoop was
split into firewood with a hatchet. It is possible that a man (supposing
he happened to be on deck at the time of the accident) might have
floated ashore on that hencoop. He might. I admit it is improbable, but
there was the man--and for days, nay, for weeks--it didn't enter our
heads that we had amongst us the only living soul that had escaped
from that disaster. The man himself, even when he learned to speak
intelligibly, could tell us very little. He remembered he had felt