h no steam-tug to help them, but by their own unaided
skill, 'heart within and God o'erhead.'

[Illustration: 'All hands in the lifeboat!' From a photograph by W. H.
Franklin.]

The following simple statement--far below the sublime reality--will
prove, if proof be needed, that the men who live between the North and
South Forelands are not inferior to their fathers who sailed with Blake
and Nelson.

About one o'clock on Sunday, December 28, 1879, a gun from the South
Sand Head lightship, anchored about a mile south of the Goodwins, and
six miles from Deal, gave warning that a ship was on the dreadful
Sands. It was blowing a gale from the south-west, and the ships in the
Downs were riding and straining at both anchors. It was a gale to stop
your breath, or, as the sailors say, 'to blow your teeth down your
throat,' and the sea was white with 'spin drift.' As the various
congregations were streaming out of church, umbrellas were turned
inside out, hats were blown hopelessly, wildly seawards, and children
clung to their parents for shelter from the blinding spray along Deal
beach.

Just then, in answer to the boom of the distant gun, the bell rang to
'man the lifeboat,' and the Deal boatmen answered gallantly to the
summons. A rush was made for the lifebelts. The first and second
coxwains, Wilds and Roberts, were all ready, and prepared with the key
of the lifeboat house, as the rush of men was made.

The first thirteen men who succeeded in getting the belts with the two
coxwains formed the crew, and down the steep beach plunged the great
lifeboat to the rescue. There were three vessels on the Goodwins: the
fate of one is uncertain; another was a small vessel painted white,
supposed to be a Dane, and she suddenly disappeared before my eyes,
being probably lost with all hands; the third was a German barque, the
Leda, homeward bound to Hamburg, with a crew of seventeen 'all told.'
This ill-fated vessel while flying on the wings of the favouring
sou'-westerly gale, supposed by the too partial poet to be

A ladies' breeze,
Bringing home their true loves,
Out of all the seas,

struck, while thus impelled at full speed before the wind, the inner
part of the S.E. spit of the Goodwin Sands. This is a most dangerous
spot, noted for the furious surf which breaks on it, and where the
writer has had a hard fight for his life with the sea.

The Germans, therefore, found this 'ladies' breeze' of Charles