spirit somewhat overshadowed that I turned away
from the grave to the hardly less melancholy spectacle of the wreck. Her
stem was above the first arc of the flood; she was broken in two a
little abaft the foremast--though indeed she had none, both masts having
broken short in her disaster; and as the pitch of the beach was very
sharp and sudden, and the bows lay many feet below the stern, the
fracture gaped widely open, and you could see right through her poor
hull upon the farther side. Her name was much defaced, and I could not
make out clearly whether she was called _Christiania_, after the
Norwegian city, or _Christiana_, after the good woman, Christian's wife,
in that old book the "Pilgrim's Progress." By her build she was a
foreign ship, but I was not certain of her nationality. She had been
painted green, but the colour was faded and weathered, and the paint
peeling off in strips. The wreck of the mainmast lay alongside,
half-buried in sand. She was a forlorn sight, indeed, and I could not
look without emotion at the bits of rope that still hung about her, so
often handled of yore by shouting seamen; or the little scuttle where
they had passed up and down to their affairs; or that poor noseless
angel of a figure-head that had dipped into so many running billows.

I do not know whether it came most from the ship or from the grave, but
I fell into some melancholy scruples, as I stood there, leaning with one
hand against the battered timbers. The homelessness of men, and even of
inanimate vessels, cast away upon strange shores, came strongly in upon
my mind. To make a profit of such pitiful misadventures seemed an
unmanly and a sordid act; and I began to think of my then quest as of
something sacrilegious in its nature. But when I remembered Mary I took
heart again. My uncle would never consent to an imprudent marriage, nor
would she, as I was persuaded, wed without his full approval. It behoved
me, then, to be up and doing for my wife; and I thought with a laugh how
long it was since that great sea-castle, the _Espirito Santo_, had left
her bones in Sandag Bay, and how weak it would be to consider rights so
long extinguished and misfortunes so long forgotten in the process of
time.

I had my theory of where to seek for her remains. The set of the current
and the soundings both pointed to the east side of the bay under the
ledge of rocks. If she had been lost in Sandag Bay, and if, after these
centuries, any porti