d with nothing in the least degree masculine about her.
She had reached her twenty-second year when the wreck took place in
connection with which her name has become famous.

The Farne Islands are peculiarly dangerous. The sea rushes with
tremendous force between the smaller islands, and, despite the warning
light, wrecks occasionally take place among them. In days of old, when
men had neither heart nor head to erect lighthouses for the protection
of their fellows, many a noble ship must have been dashed to pieces
there, and many an awful shriek must have mingled with the hoarse roar
of the surf round these rent and weatherworn rocks.

A gentleman who visited the Longstone rock in 1838, describes it thus:--

"It was, like the rest of these desolate isles, all of dark whinstone,
cracked in every direction, and worn with the action of winds, waves,
and tempests since the world began. Over the greater part of it was not
a blade of grass, nor a grain of earth; it was bare and iron-like stone,
crusted, round all the coast as far as high-water mark, with limpet and
still smaller shells. We ascended wrinkled hills of black stone, and
descended into worn and dismal dells of the same; into some of which,
where the tide got entrance, it came pouring and roaring in raging
whiteness, and churning the loose fragments of whinstone into round
pebbles, and piling them up in deep crevices with seaweeds, like great
round ropes and heaps of fucus. Over our heads screamed hundreds of
hovering birds, the gull mingling its hideous laughter most wildly."

One wild and stormy night in September 1838--such a night as induces
those on land to draw closer round the fire, and offer up, perchance, a
silent prayer for those who are at sea--a steamer was battling, at
disadvantage with the billows, off Saint Abb's Head. She was the
_Forfarshire_, a steamer of three hundred tons, under command of Mr
John Humble; and had started from Hull for Dundee with a valuable cargo,
a crew of twenty-one men, and forty-one passengers.

It was a fearful night. The storm raged furiously, and would have tried
the qualities of even a stout vessel; but this one was in very bad
repair, and her boilers were in such a state that the engines soon
became entirely useless, and at last they ceased to work. We cannot
conceive the danger of a steamer left thus comparatively helpless in a
furious storm and dark night off a dangerous coast.

In a short time the vessel