where. In all cases it
is soft and pliable under water, and sometimes in wading you sink with
alarming rapidity.

Recently attempting in company with a friend to wade a very
peculiar-looking but shallow swatch--to right and left of us being blue
swirls of deeper water, the 'fox-falls' on a smaller scale of another
part of the Sands, and exceedingly beautiful--I suddenly sank pretty
deep, and struggled back with all my energies into firmer footing from
the Goodwins' cold and tenacious embrace.

The Sands reach round you for miles, and the greater swatches cut you
off from still more distant and still more extensive reaches of sand.
In such solitudes, and with such vastness around you, of which the
great lonely level stretch makes you conscious as nothing ashore can
do, you realise what an atom you are in creation.

[Illustration: The Goodwin Sands.]

Here you see a ship's ribs. This was the schooner laden with
pipe-clay, out of which in a dangerous sea the captain and crew escaped
in their own boat, as the lifeboat advanced to save them. Far away on
the Sands you see the fluke of a ship's anchor, which from the shape
when close to it we recognise to be a French pattern.

With me stood the coxswain of the celebrated Deal lifeboat, Richard
Roberts. Intently he gazed at the projecting anchor fluke--shaft and
chain had long been sucked down into the Goodwins--and then, after a
good long look all round, taking the bearings of the deadly thing, at
last he said, 'What a dangerous thing on a dark night for the lifeboat!'

Just think, good reader! The lifeboat, close reefed, flies to the
rescue on the wings of the storm into the furious seas which revel and
rage on the Goodwins. Her fifteen men dauntlessly face the wild
smother. She sinks ponderously in the trough of a great roller, and
the anchor fluke is driven right through her bottom and holds her to
the place--for hold her it would, long enough to let the breakers tear
every living soul out of her!

Under our feet and deep in the sand lie vessels one over another, and
in them all that vessels carry. Countless treasures must be buried
there--the treasures of centuries. Witness the Osta Junis, a Dutch
East Indiaman, which, treasure-laden with money and other valuables to
a great amount, ran on the Goodwin Sands, July 12, 1783. The Deal
boatmen were quickly on board, and brought the treasures ashore, which,
as it was war time, were prize to the Crown, and were