e, in generous emulation, starts a
Lifeboat Institution of its own, and sends over to ask our society to
supply it with boats--and, last, but not least, it has been said that
foreigners, driven far out of their course and stranded, soon come to
know that they have been wrecked on the British coast, by the
persevering efforts that are made to save their lives!

And now, good reader, let me urge this subject on your earnest
consideration. Surely every one should be ready to lend a hand to
_rescue the perishing_! One would think it almost superfluous to say
more. So it would be, if there were none who required the line of duty
and privilege to be pointed out to them. But I fear that many,
especially dwellers in the interior of our land, are not sufficiently
alive to the claims that the lifeboat has upon them.

Let me illustrate this by a case or two--imaginary cases, I admit, but
none the less illustrative on that account.

"Mother," says a little boy, with flashing eyes and curly flaxen hair;
"I want to go to sea!"

He has been reading "Cook's Voyages" and "Robinson Crusoe," and looks
wistfully out upon the small pond in front of his home, which is the
biggest "bit of water" his eyes have ever seen, for he dwells among the
cornfields and pastures of the interior of the land.

"Don't think of it, darling Willie. You might get wrecked,--perhaps
drowned."

But "darling Willie" does think of it, and asserts that being wrecked is
the very thing he wants, and that he's willing to take his chance of
being drowned! And Willie goes on thinking of it, year after year,
until he gains his point, and becomes the family's "sailor boy," and
mayhap, for the first time in her life, Willie's mother casts more than
a passing glance at newspaper records of lifeboat work. But she does no
more. She has not yet been awakened. "The people of the coast
naturally look after the things of the coast," has been her sentiment on
the subject--if she has had any definite sentiments about it at all.

On returning from his first voyage Willie's ship is wrecked. On a
horrible night, in the howling tempest, with his flaxen curls tossed
about, his hands convulsively clutching the shrouds of the topmast, and
the hissing billows leaping up as if they wished to lick him off his
refuge on the cross-trees, Willie awakens to the dread reality about
which he had dreamed when reading Cook and Crusoe. Next morning a lady
with livid face, and eyes g