mental in saving between four and five hundred lives.

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Note 2. If the reader should desire to know something more of the
history of the celebrated Ramsgate lifeboat, which, owing to its
position, opportunities, and advantages, has had the most stirring
career of all the lifeboat fleet, we advise the perusal of a work (at
present in the press, if it be not already published) named _Storm
Warriors, or the Ramsgate Lifeboat and the Goodwin Sands_, by the
Reverend John Gilmore, whose able and thrilling articles on the
lifeboat-service in _Macmillan's Magazine_ are well known.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

SHOWS THAT THERE ARE NO EFFECTS WITHOUT ADEQUATE CAUSES.

There were not a few surprising and unexpected meetings that day on
Ramsgate pier. Foremost among the hundreds who pressed forward to shake
the lifeboat-men by the hand, and to sympathise with and congratulate
the wrecked and rescued people, was Mr George Durant. It mattered
nothing to that stout enthusiast that his hat had been swept away into
hopeless destruction during his frantic efforts to get to the front,
leaving his polished head exposed to the still considerable fury of the
blast and the intermittent violence of the sun; and it mattered, if
possible, still less that the wreck turned out to be one of his own
vessels; but it was a matter of the greatest interest and amazement to
him to find that the first man he should meet in the crowd and seize in
a hearty embrace, was his young friend, Stanley Hall.

"What, Stanney!" he exclaimed in unmitigated surprise; "is it--can it
be? Prodigious sight!"

The old gentleman could say no more, but continued for a few seconds to
wring the hands of his young friend, gaze in his face, and vent himself
in gusts of surprise and bursts of tearful laughter, to the great
interest and amusement of the bystanders.

Mr Durant's inconsistent conduct may be partly accounted for and
excused by the fact that Stanley had stepped on the pier with no other
garments on than a pair of trousers and a shirt, the former having a
large rent on the right knee, and the latter being torn open at the
breast, in consequence of the violent removal of all the buttons when
its owner was dragged into the lifeboat. As, in addition to this, the
young man's dishevelled hair did duty for a cap, and his face and hands
were smeared with oil and tar from the flare-lights which he