of a barque, the Maritzburg, bound to Port Natal. I had visited the
men in the forecastle, and indeed all hands fore and aft, as Missions
to Seamen chaplain; and to them all I spoke, and was, in fact, speaking
of that only 'Name under heaven whereby we must be saved,' when my eyes
were riveted, as I gazed right under the sun, by the drama being
enacted away to the southward.

There I saw, three miles off, our two lifeboats of Kingsdown and
Walmer, each in tow of a steamer which came to their aid, making for
the Goodwins, and on the outer edge of the Goodwins I beheld a hapless
brig, with sails set, aground. I saw her at that distance lifted by
the heavy sea, and at that distance I saw the great tumble of the
billows. That she had heavily struck the bottom I also saw, for
crash!--and even at that distance I verily seemed to hear the
crash--away went her mainmast over her side, and the next instant she
was gone, and had absolutely and entirely disappeared. I could not
believe my eyes, and rubbed them and gazed again and yet again.

She had perished with all hands. The lifeboats, fast as they went,
were just too late, and found nothing but a nameless boat, bottom
upwards, and a lifebelt, and no one ever knew her nationality or name.
She had struck the Goodwins, and had been probably burst open by the
shock, and then, dragged by the great offtide to the east, had rolled
into the deep water outside the Goodwins and close to its dreadful edge.

What a sermon! What a summons! There they lie till the sea give up
its dead, and we all 'appear before the judgment seat of Christ.'

The origin of the Goodwin Sands is a very interesting question, and is
discussed at length in Mr. Gattie's attractive _Memorials of the
Goodwin Sands_. There is the romantic tradition that they once, as the
'fertile island of Lomea,' formed part of the estates of the great Earl
Godwin, and that as a punishment for his crimes they 'sonke sodainly
into the sea.' Another tradition, given by W. Lambard, tells us that
in the end of the reign of William Rufus, 1099 A.D., there was 'a
sodaine and mighty inundation of the sea, by the which a great part of
Flaunders and of the lowe countries thereabouts was drenched and lost;'
and Lambard goes on to quote Hector Boethius to the effect that 'this
place, being sometyme in the possession of the Earl Godwin, was then
first violently overwhelmed with a light sande, wherewith it not only
remayneth covered