ave lost the whole of your life,
for the boat is sinking and you'll be drowned." Now, Sir, I think that
if those fathers who spend so much money on the intellectual education
of their children, would devote but a small portion of it to securing
for them a knowledge of the art of swimming, they would confer a great
blessing on those children, and also on society at large. I would have
every one learn to swim females as well as males; for many of both sexes
come under my notice every year who are drowned, but who, with a little
skill in swimming, might have been saved. Not fewer than forty men and
boys were lost from the Hull Smacks alone during the year 1866, of whom
twenty per cent, might have been saved had they been able to swim.'

[Sidenote: HE LEARNS TO SWIM.]

Mr. Ellerthorpe was, for many years, Master of the 'Hull Swimming Club,'
and also of 'The College Youth's Swimming Club,' and his whole life was
a practical lesson on the value of the art of swimming. He contended
that the youths of Hull ought to be taught this art, and pleaded that a
sheet of water which had been waste and unproductive for twenty years
should be transformed into a swimming bath. The local papers favoured
the scheme, and Alderman Dennison, moved in the Town Council, that L350
should be devoted to this object, which was carried by a majority. The
late Titus Salt, Esq., who had given L5,000 to the 'Sailor's Orphan
Home,' said at the time, 'I think _your corporation ought to make the
swimming bath_ alluded to in the enclosed paper; _do ask them_.' 'The
private individual who gives his _fifty_ hundreds to a particular
Institution,' to use the words of the _Hull and Eastern Counties'
Herald, Oct. 10th_, 1857, 'has surely a right to express an opinion that
the municipal corporation ought to grant _three_ hundreds, if by so
doing the public weal would be provided. If the voice of such a man is
to be disregarded, then it may truly be said that our good old town has
fallen far below the exalted position it occupied when it produced its
Wilberforce and its Marvel.'

For upwards of forty years Mr. Ellerthorpe was known as a fearless
swimmer and diver, and during that period he saved no fewer than forty
lives by his daring intrepidity. In his boyhood, he, to use his own
expression, '_felt quite at home in the water_,' and betook himself to
it as natively and instinctively as the swan to the water or the lark to
the sky. 'This art,' to use the words of