rate, named Ralph the Rover, in a mischievous mood,
cut the bell away, and that, years afterwards, he obtained his
appropriate reward by being wrecked on the Bell Rock, when returning
from a long cruise laden with booty.

Whether this be true or not is an open question, but certain it is
that no beacon of any kind was erected on this rock until the
beginning of the nineteenth century, after a great storm in 1799 had
stirred the public mind, and set springs in motion, which from that
time forward have never ceased to operate.

Many and disastrous were the shipwrecks that occurred during the
storm referred to, which continued, with little intermission, for
three days. Great numbers of ships were driven from their moorings
in the Downs and Yarmouth Roads; and these, together with all vessels
navigating the German Ocean at that time, were drifted upon the east
coast of Scotland.

It may not, perhaps, be generally known that there are only three
great inlets or estuaries to which the mariner steers when overtaken
by easterly storms in the North Sea--namely, the Humber, and the
firths of Forth and Moray. The mouth of the Thames is too much
encumbered by sand-banks to be approached at night or during bad
weather. The Humber is also considerably obstructed in this way, so
that the Roads of Leith, in the Firth of Forth, and those of
Cromarty, in the Moray Firth, are the chief places of resort in
easterly gales. But both of these had their special risks.

On the one hand, there was the danger of mistaking the Dornoch Firth
for the Moray, as it lies only a short way to the north of the
latter; and, in the case of the Firth of Forth, there was the
terrible Bell Rock.

Now, during the storm of which we write, the fear of those two
dangers was so strong upon seamen that many vessels were lost in
trying to avoid them, and much hardship was sustained by mariners who
preferred to seek shelter in higher latitudes. It was estimated that
no fewer than seventy vessels were either stranded or lost during
that single gale, and many of the crews perished.

At one wild part of the coast, near Peterhead, called the Bullers of
Buchan, after the first night of the storm, the wrecks of seven
vessels were found in one cove, without a single survivor of the
crews to give an account of the disaster.

The "dangers of the deep" are nothing compared with the _dangers of
the shore_. If the hard rocks of our island could tell the tale of
their ex