a day and a half, there were skippers who sat,
unrelieved, at the tiller of their boat, an awful weight of
responsibility on their shoulders, human lives depending on their nerve
and skill. Some of these men had to be carried ashore, when at length
they reached safety; the legs of one were found to be so twisted and
wedged in beneath his seat, that it was only with the greatest
difficulty and pain that he was got out of the boat.

There was one boat that found refuge at Shields on the Sunday. She
arrived too late to permit of a telegram being sent announcing her
safety, but in time to allow her crew--or what was left of it--to catch
a late train to the north, and the solemn, echoing tramp of their heavy
feet at midnight in the silent street of Eyemouth brought the stricken
people from their beds with a start, and with vague apprehension of
fresh disaster. But their dread was turned to rejoicing, except for the
family of that man who came home never again. In all, on that Sunday
night it was known that sixty-four of the men of Eyemouth had perished,
and seventy-one were still missing. Of these but a handful ever
returned. Eyemouth alone lost one hundred and twenty-nine--the men of
whole families, almost of clans, swept away. Truly to her that day was
as of old had been Flodden Field to Scotland. The total number of men
who perished along this coast in that hurricane was one hundred and
eighty-nine.

Will the terror of that time ever be forgotten, or its horror wiped out
from the town of Eyemouth? In the face of disaster such as that, smaller
happenings appear for the time almost insignificant. Yet it was but the
other year that another great gale on that coast brought disaster most
pitiful. A Danish steamer, feeling her way to the Firth of Forth in
weather thick with fog and with a great gale blowing, mistaking her
position, came creeping in the darkness close in to the little village
of St. Abb's. Nearer and nearer to the people, snug in their warm,
well-lit houses, came the roar of her fog-horn. And then, from the
neighbourhood of a treacherous rock--awash at low water--and little more
than a stone's throw from the village houses, there rushed up a rocket,
and a flare was seen dimly burning. In the heavy sea, the steamer had
brought her bows with a mighty crash on to that sunken rock, and there
she lay, the great seas sweeping her from stem to stern. Rockets from
the cliff that overlooked the wreck could not reach he