while candles, stuck in bayonet-handles in the
wall, poured out a wild glare over shaggy faces and glittering weapons,
and piles of timber, and rusty iron cable, that glowed red-hot in the
light, and then streamed up the glen towards us through the salt misty
air in long fans of light, sending fiery bars over the brown transparent
oak foliage and the sad beds of withered autumn flowers, and glorifying
the wild flakes of foam, as they rushed across the light-stream, into
troops of tiny silver angels, that vanished into the night and hid
themselves among the woods from the fierce spirit of the storm. And
then, just where the glare of the lights and watch-fires was most
brilliant, there too the black shadows of the cliff had placed the point
of intensest darkness, lightening gradually upwards right and left,
between the two great jaws of the glen, into a chaos of grey mist, where
the eye could discern no form of sea or cloud, but a perpetual shifting
and quivering as if the whole atmosphere was writhing with agony in the
clutches of the wind.

The ship was breaking up; and we sat by her like hopeless physicians by
a deathbed-side, to watch the last struggle,--and "the effects of the
deceased." I recollect our literally warping ourselves down to the
beach, holding on by rocks and posts. There was a saddened awe-struck
silence, even upon the gentleman from Lloyd's with the pen behind his
ear. A sudden turn of the clouds let in a wild gleam of moonshine upon
the white leaping heads of the breakers, and on the pyramid of the
Black-church Rock, which stands in summer in such calm grandeur gazing
down on the smiling bay, with the white sand of Braunton and the red
cliffs of Portledge shining through its two vast arches; and against a
slab of rock on the right, for years afterwards discoloured with her
paint, lay the ship, rising slowly on every surge, to drop again with
a piteous crash as the wave fell back from the cliff, and dragged the
roaring pebbles back with it under the coming wall of foam. You have
heard of ships at the last moment crying aloud like living things in
agony? I heard it then, as the stumps of her masts rocked and reeled in
her, and every plank and joint strained and screamed with the dreadful
tension.

A horrible image--a human being shrieking on the rack; rose up before
me at those strange semi-human cries, and would not be put away--and I
tried to turn, and yet my eyes were riveted on the black mass, whi