t, and he wanted
to see if it stood the night's work. He took the path across
Gunner's Meadow--where they buried most of the bodies afterwards.
The wind was right in his teeth at the time, and once on the way
(he's told me this often) a great strip of ore-weed came flying
through the darkness and fetched him a slap on the cheek like a cold
hand. But he made shift pretty well till he got to Lowland, and then
had to drop upon his hands and knees and crawl, digging his fingers
every now and then into the shingle to hold on, for he declared to me
that the stones, some of them as big as a man's head, kept rolling
and driving past till it seemed the whole foreshore was moving
westward under him. The fence was gone, of course; not a stick left
to show where it stood; so that, when first he came to the place, he
thought he must have missed his bearings. My father, sir, was a very
religious man; and if he reckoned the end of the world was at hand--
there in the great wind and night, among the moving stones--you may
believe he was certain of it when he heard a gun fired, and, with
the same, saw a flame shoot up out of the darkness to windward,
making a sudden fierce light in all the place about. All he could
find to think or say was, 'The Second Coming--The Second Coming!
The Bridegroom cometh, and the wicked He will toss like a ball into a
large country!' and being already upon his knees, he just bowed his
head and 'bided, saying this over and over.

"But by'm-by, between two squalls, he made bold to lift his head and
look, and then by the light--a bluish colour 'twas--he saw all the
coast clear away to Manacle Point, and off the Manacles, in the thick
of the weather, a sloop-of-war with top-gallants housed, driving
stern foremost towards the reef. It was she, of course, that was
burning the flare. My father could see the white streak and the
ports of her quite plain as she rose to it, a little outside the
breakers, and he guessed easy enough that her captain had just
managed to wear ship, and was trying to force her nose to the sea
with the help of her small bower anchor and the scrap or two of
canvas that hadn't yet been blown out of her. But while he looked,
she fell off, giving her broadside to it foot by foot, and drifting
back on the breakers around Carn du and the Varses. The rocks lie so
thick thereabouts, that 'twas a toss up which she struck first; at
any rate, my father couldn't tell at the time, for just th