way) to suppose that the peasantry had shown any superstitious
avoidance of the drowned; on the whole, they had done very well,
and had assisted readily. Ten shillings had been paid for the
bringing of each body up to the church, but the way was steep, and
a horse and cart (in which it was wrapped in a sheet) were
necessary, and three or four men, and, all things considered, it
was not a great price. The people were none the richer for the
wreck, for it was the season of the herring-shoal--and who could
cast nets for fish, and find dead men and women in the draught?

He had the church keys in his hand, and opened the churchyard gate,
and opened the church door; and we went in.

It is a little church of great antiquity; there is reason to
believe that some church has occupied the spot, these thousand
years or more. The pulpit was gone, and other things usually
belonging to the church were gone, owing to its living congregation
having deserted it for the neighbouring school-room, and yielded it
up to the dead. The very Commandments had been shouldered out of
their places, in the bringing in of the dead; the black wooden
tables on which they were painted, were askew, and on the stone
pavement below them, and on the stone pavement all over the church,
were the marks and stains where the drowned had been laid down.
The eye, with little or no aid from the imagination, could yet see
how the bodies had been turned, and where the head had been and
where the feet. Some faded traces of the wreck of the Australian
ship may be discernible on the stone pavement of this little
church, hundreds of years hence, when the digging for gold in
Australia shall have long and long ceased out of the land.