nt horizon. Day by day a sadder weight came down on weeping
child and broken-hearted wife; and now all hope is gone, and all felt
that in the fury of the gale the _Skimmer of the Sea_ foundered with all
her hands. Well, as the good old Admiral said, as he and his men were
about to perish, 'My lads, the way to heaven is as short by sea as by
land.' But the wounded heart in the agony of its grief is slow to
realize that fact. Sailors ought to be serious men; every halfpenny they
earn is won at the risk of a life. In Lowestoft, I am glad to find, many
of them are. 'The Salvation Army has done 'em a deal of good,' says a
decent woman, with whom I happened to scrape an acquaintance at the most
attractive coffee-house I have ever seen--the Coffee Pot at Mutford
Bridge. 'Not that I holds with the Salvation Army myself, sir, but
they've done the men a deal of good, and they don't spend their wages, as
they used to do, in drink.'

Lowestoft, when I was there last, had just lost one of its heroes--I mean
the late Mr. George Borrow--whose 'Bible in Spain' was the talk of the
season in religious and worldly circles alike, and whose writings on
Gipsies and Wild Wales and the 'Bible in Spain' achieved at one time an
enormous popularity. He lived--I can still remember his tall form--on a
bank a couple of miles out of Lowestoft, sloping down to a large piece of
water known in those parts as Oulton Broad. The tourist, if he looks to
his right just after he has passed Mutford Bridge on the rail from
Lowestoft to Beccles, across the wide sheet of water, which, as I saw it
last, lay calm and blue in the fading glory of an autumnal sun, will
perhaps see a white house at a distance, nestled in among the
fir-trees--that was where George Borrow lived, and where he died, though
he was buried in Brompton Cemetery by the side of his wife. You cannot
make a mistake, for houses are rare in those parts. As his step-daughter
observed to me, the proper way is by water; to get to the house by
land--at least as I did--you walk along the rail for a couple of miles,
then break off across a bit of a swamp, to a little lane that conducts
you to Oulton Church--a very ancient one, which, however, is in a state
of good repair and is noted partly on account of the fact that the
steeple is built in the middle, and partly on account of its containing,
so it is said, the earliest example of a brass to an ecclesiastic which
is to be found in England. A n