much pinching and pulling they could bear."

So they walked on, along a sheep-path, and over the Spur, and down to
the Cove.

It was such a morning as often follows a gale, when the great
firmament stares down upon the ruin which it has made, bright and
clear, and bold; and seems to say, with shameless smile,--"There,
I have done it; and am as merry as ever after it all!" Beneath a
cloudless sky, the breakers, still grey and foul from the tempest,
were tumbling in before a cold northern breeze. Half a mile out at
sea, the rough backs of the Chough and Crow loomed black and sulky in
the foam. At their feet, the rocks and shingle of the Cove were alive
with human beings--groups of women and children clustering round a
corpse or a chest; sailors, knee-deep in the surf hauling at floating
spars and ropes; oil-skinned coast-guardsmen pacing up and down in
charge of goods, while groups of farmers' men, who had hurried down
from the villages inland, lounged about on the top of the cliff,
looking sulkily on, hoping for plunder: and yet half afraid to mingle
with the sailors below, who looked on them as an inferior race, and
refused, in general, to intermarry with them.

The Lieutenant plainly held much the same opinion; for as a party of
them tried to descend the narrow path to the beach, he shouted after
them to come back.

"Eh! you won't?" and out rattled from its scabbard the old worthy's
sword. "Come back, I say, you loafing, miching, wrecking crow-keepers;
there are no pickings for you here. Brown, send those fellows back
with the bayonet. None but blue-jackets allowed on the beach!" And the
labourers go up again, grumbling.

"Can't trust those landsharks. They'll plunder even the rings off a
corpse's fingers. They think every wreck a godsend. I've known them,
after they've been driven off, roll great stones over the cliff at
night on the coast-guard, just out of spite; while these blue-jackets
here--I can depend on them. Can you tell me the reason of that, as you
seem a bit of a philosopher?"

"It is easy enough; the sailors have a fellow-feeling with sailors,
and the landsmen have none. Besides, the sailors are finer fellows,
body and soul; and the reason is that they have been brought up to
face danger, and the landsmen haven't."

"Well," said the Lieutenant, "unless a man has been taught to look
death in the face, he never will grow up, I believe, to be much of a
man at all."

"Danger, my good sir, is a be