ing my pleasant
sojourn with them in their interesting and peculiar home.

My best thanks, for much useful and thrilling information, are due to
Mr Isaac Jarman, the coxswain, and Mr Fish, the bowman, of the
Ramsgate Lifeboat-men who may be said to carry their lives continually
in their hands, and whose profession it is to go out at the call of duty
and systematically grapple with Death and rob him of his prey. To the
Harbour Master, and Deputy Harbour Master at Ramsgate, I am also
indebted for information and assistance, and to Mr Reading, the master
of the Aid steam-tug, which attends upon, and shares the perils of, the
Lifeboat.

R.M. BALLANTYNE.

EDINBURGH, 1870.

CHAPTER ONE.

PARTICULAR INQUIRIES.

A light--clear, ruddy and brilliant, like a huge carbuncle--uprose one
evening from the deep, and remained hovering about forty feet above the
surface, scattering its rays far and wide, over the Downs to Ramsgate
and Deal, along the coast towards Dover, away beyond the North Foreland,
across the Goodwin Sands, and far out upon the bosom of the great North
Sea.

It was a chill November evening, when this light arose, in the year--
well, it matters not what year. We have good reasons, reader, for
shrouding this point in mystery. It may have been recently; it may have
been "long, long ago." We don't intend to tell. It was not the first
time of that light's appearance, and it certainly was not the last. Let
it suffice that what we are about to relate did happen, sometime or
other within the present century.

Besides being cold, the evening in question was somewhat
stormy--"gusty," as was said of it by a traveller with a stern visage
and remarkably keen grey eyes, who entered the coffee-room of an hotel
which stood on the margin of Ramsgate harbour facing the sea, and from
the upper windows of which the light just mentioned was visible.

"It is, sir," said the waiter, in reply to the "gusty" observation,
stirring the fire while the traveller divested himself of his hat and
greatcoat.

"Think it's going to blow hard?" inquired the traveller, planting
himself firmly on the hearth-rug, with his back to the fire, and his
thumbs hooked into the armholes of his waistcoat.

"It may, sir, and it may not," answered the waiter, with the caution of
a man who has resolved, come what may, never to commit himself.
"Sometimes it comes on to blow, sir, w'en we don't look for it; at other
times it falls calm w'en w