the melancholy relics of some unhappy voyagers, and
much more likely to warn people to shun destruction, than entice
and delude them to it."

"And so," said the old man with a smile, which had more of sorrow
in it than of mirth,--"and so, young man, these black and shattered
hulks seem to the eye of the multitude. But things are not what
they seem: that water, a kind and convenient servant to the wants
of man, which seems so smooth, and so dimpling, and so gentle,
has swallowed up a human soul even now; and the place which it
covers, so fair and so level, is a faithless quicksand, out of
which none escape. Things are otherwise than they seem. Had you
lived as long as I have had the sorrow to live; had you seen the
storms, and braved the perils, and endured the distresses which
have befallen me; had you sat gazing out on the dreary ocean at
midnight on a haunted coast; had you seen comrade after comrade,
brother after brother, and son after son, swept away by the merciless
ocean from your very side; had you seen the shapes of friends,
doomed to the wave and the quicksand, appearing to you in the dreams
and visions of the night,--then would your mind have been prepared
for crediting the maritime legends of mariners; and the two haunted
Danish ships would have had their terrors for you, as they have
for all who sojourn on this coast.

"Of the time and the cause of their destruction," continued the
old man, "I know nothing certain: they have stood as you have seen
them for uncounted time; and while all other ships wrecked on this
unhappy coast have gone to pieces, and rotted, and sunk away in a few
years, these two haunted hulks have neither sunk in the quicksand,
nor has a single spar or board been displaced. Maritime legend says,
that two ships of Denmark having had permission, for a time, to work
deeds of darkness and dolor on the deep, were at last condemned to
the whirlpool and the sunken rock, and were wrecked in this bonnie
bay, as a sign to seamen to be gentle and devout. The night when they
were lost was a harvest evening of uncommon mildness and beauty:
the sun had newly set; the moon came brighter and brighter out;
and the reapers, laying their sickles at the root of the standing
corn, stood on rock and bank, looking at the increasing magnitude
of the waters, for sea and land were visible from Saint Bees to
Barnhourie. The sails of two vessels were soon seen bent for the
Scottish coast; and with a speed outrun