sidered their lawful due. If a vessel drove
ashore on their coast, that surely was the act and the will of God, and
it was not for them to question His decrees or to thwart His intentions.

Many, since the days of the wreckers, have been the ships cast away
along that rugged coast-line which starts southward from the grim
promontory of St. Abb's Head, and runs, cruelly rock-girt or stretched
in open bay of yellow sand, away past Berwick and down by Holy Island.
Many have been the disasters, pitiful on occasion the loss of life. But
never, since history began, has disaster come upon the coast like to
that which befell the little town of Eyemouth in the early autumn of
1881, never has loss of life so heartrending overwhelmed a small
community. Once the headquarters of smuggling on our eastern coast, and
built--as it is well known was also built a certain street of small
houses in Spittal--with countless facilities for promoting the
operations of "Free Trade," and with "bolt-holes" innumerable for the
smugglers when close pressed by gangers, Eyemouth is still a quaint
little town, huddling its strangely squeezed-up houses in narrow lanes
and wynds betwixt river and bay. There, too, as at a northern town
better known to fame than Eyemouth,

"The grey North Ocean girds it round,
And o'er the rocks, and up the bay,
The long sea-rollers surge and sound,
And still the thin and biting spray
Drives down the melancholy street."

* * * * *

Truly, in Eyemouth it is not alone spray that drives. So close a
neighbour is the protecting sea-wall to some of the houses that turn
weather-beaten backs on the bay, that at high tide during a
north-easterly gale the giant seas, breaking against the wall, burst
also clear over the houses, hurling themselves in torrents of icy water
into the street beyond. And up the width of one little street that runs
to the bay, and past its barricaded doors, you may see sometimes billows
that have overleapt the wall come charging, to ebb with angry swish and
long-drawn clatter of shingle as the waves suck back. It is a strange
sight, and it causes one to wonder what manner of men they are who dwell
here, who draw their living from the bosom of a sea that thus harshly
treats its children. Yet it is a sea that can be kindly enough; and in
the long, golden summer evenings, when the brown-sailed fishing-boats in
endless procession draw out from the "ha