Yet, only two short months had gone, since a man, living on the
nearest hill-top overlooking the sea, being blown out of bed at
about daybreak by the wind that had begun to strip his roof off,
and getting upon a ladder with his nearest neighbour to construct
some temporary device for keeping his house over his head, saw from
the ladder's elevation as he looked down by chance towards the
shore, some dark troubled object close in with the land. And he
and the other, descending to the beach, and finding the sea
mercilessly beating over a great broken ship, had clambered up the
stony ways, like staircases without stairs, on which the wild
village hangs in little clusters, as fruit hangs on boughs, and had
given the alarm. And so, over the hill-slopes, and past the
waterfall, and down the gullies where the land drains off into the
ocean, the scattered quarrymen and fishermen inhabiting that part
of Wales had come running to the dismal sight--their clergyman
among them. And as they stood in the leaden morning, stricken with
pity, leaning hard against the wind, their breath and vision often
failing as the sleet and spray rushed at them from the ever forming
and dissolving mountains of sea, and as the wool which was a part
of the vessel's cargo blew in with the salt foam and remained upon
the land when the foam melted, they saw the ship's life-boat put
off from one of the heaps of wreck; and first, there were three men
in her, and in a moment she capsized, and there were but two; and
again, she was struck by a vast mass of water, and there was but
one; and again, she was thrown bottom upward, and that one, with
his arm struck through the broken planks and waving as if for the
help that could never reach him, went down into the deep.

It was the clergyman himself from whom I heard this, while I stood
on the shore, looking in his kind wholesome face as it turned to