been spent in setting life-boats up about the coast is squared against the lives saved, there's a life for every four pound seven and twopence. That's the sum. So, the more five-pound notes go that way, the fewer of us will go this way;" and he laid a wrinkled finger on the sail. "But you couldn't tell 'em anything from the pulpit, sir, unless it wor in charity sermons, about what is to be bought with fi'-pun' notes. Ah, dear! I wish I had a lot of 'em!"

When, a week after the storm, I went in search of a physician to the seaport Jem had named, and, waiting his time to return with me when he had seen his patients on the spot, walked sadly by the ripple of a placid sea, I came by accident upon the life-boat house. It was a neat stone building with some show of architecture in it, with a verandah east and west sheltering forms upon which pilots and others might sit under cover in foul weather. I had been told that, at this town, boat-house and boat were the gift of a lady of fortune, and it was evident that she was one who did not give with two fingers. The wide folding-doors opening upon the sea were closed and locked. A boy with a shrimp basket, at my request, went off in search of Bill the coxswain, who had charge of one of the keys; and Bill was talkative enough when he found whence I came, and whither I was about to return that evening, also that I would take a bit of parcel back with me from his wife to her old father, and that I did really care very much to know what he could show and tell me. But what he told me caused me to make more inquiry, to get books and papers, and, at last, to write as I now do, while I sit watching the night through by the bedside of my little Ethel, with the moan of the night wind and the measured dash of the sea filling up all pauses in my thoughts.

Upon our island coast touch, in each year, ships that employ a million of men and boys. Every year, about a thousand vessels suffer upon the shores of Britain, wreck total or partial, and sometimes five hundred, sometimes fifteen hundred (in the very last year sixteen hundred and forty-six) lives have been lost. In the first half only of this current year, the average of twelve months of disaster has already been attained. Of the total wrecks, nearly one half the number is found to arise from errors in seamanship or other preventable causes, and seventeen in a hundred have occurred to unseaworthy vessels. Some also are lost (there have been eight lost in one year) because they have been provided with defective charts or compasses. It is the duty of some one to secure the timely condemnation of old vessels, which are now sent out until they sink at sea, and bring to an untimely death the men they carry. Of the ships lost, only one out of four is lost in a storm. Oversight, ignorance, neglect, and false economy, are more cruel than storms. Wrecks themselves are in a great degree preventable. But here the only question is, how to prevent loss of life by wreck within sight

of the British shores.

The wrecks on our coast last year were more numerous than they have been in any former year of which record is kept. The excess was caused by two violent gales. In the gale of the twentyfifth and twenty-sixth of October, there were one hundred and thirty-three total wrecks and ninety casualties. The number of lives lost in that one gale on our shores was within two of eight hundred. The loss of life would have been great, had the dead list not been more than doubled by the loss of four hundred and fortysix lives in the Royal Charter. After a rest of five days, the winds blew again on the first day of November; and, in that second gale, twentynine lives were lost in the wreck of thirty-eight vessels. There were also two great wrecks on other days to swell the death list. In the beginning of spring, more than four hundred lives were lost at once in the Pomona. Fifty-six were lost in midwinter with the Blervie Castle. These were all deaths on our shore. Of wrecks at sea nothing is said. It has been found that the proportion of accident has become much greater than it used to be in British, as compared with foreign vessels. Putting out of account the coasting trade, and reckoning the oversea trade only, the chance of accident to a British ship is once in one hundred and seventy-five voyages; but that, to a foreign ship, the average of accident is only once in three hundred and thirty-five voyages; accidents upon our coasts, therefore-strange fact !-are twice as likely to occur to a vessel that is at home, as to the vessel of a stranger.

One accident occurred to a vessel aged more than a century, one to a ship between eighty and ninety, and another to a ship between ninety and a hundred years of age. Sixty-four wrecks were of ships more than fifty years old; but, it is between the ages of fourteen and twenty, that ships have appeared to suffer most. The age next in liability to misfortune was between twenty and thirty; then the comparatively new ships, between three and seven, suffered most. Of the wrecks last year, more than six hundred were on the east coast, less than five hundred on the west coast, and less than one hundred and fifty on the south coast. On the Irish coast there were but ninety-nine wrecks, against one hundred and sixty-eight in the preceding year, but wrecks on the Isle of Man increased in number from six to twenty-eight.

The value of the property lost by the wrecks on our coast last year was two millions of money, the lives lost were, as before said, one thousand six hundred and forty-five; but as there were more wrecks, more losses than ever, so were there also more lives saved from wreck than ever. About three hundred were saved by lifeboats, nearly as many by the rocket-and-mortar apparatus, a thousand by luggers, coast-guard or fishermen's boats, and small craft, nearly eight hundred by ships and steam-vessels, and six by the heroism of individuals.

Last year, as in the previous year, it was the south-west wind that proved most disastrous. Of the two most fatal gales, Admiral Fitzroy

has pointed out that they were foretold by both thermometer and barometer, and that their advance could have been telegraphed from the southern to the eastern and northern coasts in sufficient time to ensure full preparation. "It is proved," writes the admiral, "that storms are preceded by distinct warnings, and that they advance in particular directions towards places where their influence is felt some time after it has become marked elsewhere. Therefore, information may be conveyed by telegraph, in time to caution those at a distance who are likely to be visited by bad weather." Of the message swifter than the wind, no use has yet been made for the protection of our sailors.

Warning was again neglected, of the yet more terrible gales of this year. In the lost Yarmouth fishing-boats alone, one hundred and thirty men perished, two hundred in the boats from Yarmouth and the adjacent dozen miles of coast, and they have left two hundred children fatherless.

The courage and humanity of all the boatmen of our coast appear in the return of lives saved. We must not think of the rocket-andmortar apparatus and the life-boat stations as the sole dependence of the shipwrecked mariner whose eye strains towards British ground expecting help. But the life-boat can brave storms in which a coast-guard boat or fisher boat could not venture to put out; it has a trained crew and every provision for the rescue of men from a wreck; it is ready to slip out to its work at a minute's warning, and the men saved by a lifeboat very commonly are men whom nothing but a life-boat could have saved.

Almost the first blot on the records of the life-boat service was the selfish struggle, during one of the late gales, among men of the Yarmouth life-boat, who retained the boat ashore, disputing among themselves for the right to the place of coxswain, while men were being drowned before their eyes from a wrecked brig upon the Scroby Sands. The boat that could have saved all hands went out too late, and came back as it went out, in disgrace. Very different was the temper of the Margate life-boatmen, who, coming to the shore a minute or two late, and finding their boat manned by other seamen, threw them their waterproofs, with a kind cheer to speed them on their swift errand of mercy.

There is a fund annually granted by this nation for the acknowledgment of gallant services in saving life at sea. It is spent, not in reward, but in thankful recognition of a generosity bounded by no national distinctions. Now, it is an American captain who saves thirty English lives, maintains them in his ship for forty days, and joins his owners in refusing compensation. Now, it is a French custom-house officer, himself unable to swim, who has plunged into the sea to save a drowning Englishman, or who totters from a sick-bed to help in the rescue of an English wreck upon his coast. Now, it is a Genoese captain who saves a crew of fourteen men, maintains them for three weeks, and will

not be paid. Now, it is a Greek and now a Dutchman, now a Dane and now a Portuguese, who has braved death and storm for the help of imperilled Englishmen. The Maltese seaman of the Royal Charter none forget.

The public recognition of the duty for which all hearts are so ready, as regards the saving of wretched men upon our shores, has for its best evidence the life-boat. There were last year one hundred and fifty-eight life-boat stations on the coasts of the three kingdoms. Many of these are maintained by the harbour commissioners, dock trustees, or other local representatives of shipping interests, of the ports at which they are found. One or two are maintained by the generosity of individuals; but the great majority-ninety-two last year, and after a few months this year, one hundred and one-are under the management of the National Lifeboat Institution. This Institution relies on the public for its means, but has a subsidy of about two thousand a year from the Board of Trade, which spends also another two thousand on the maintenance and use of the mortar-and-rocket apparatus. On the Institution just named, government depends for the maintenance and advancement of an efficient life-boat system. What is its history, and what is it about?

It was founded six-and-thirty years ago, and is actively represented by a committee mainly composed of mercantile men and officers in the navy, with the Chairman of Lloyd's, the Comptroller-General of the Coast-Guard, the Hydrographer to the Admiralty, and others. The committee sits in London, and, on the part of the Institution, its business is to build, station, and maintain in repair life-boats of the most perfect description; to furnish them with all necessary appurtenances, including boat-houses and carriages for the conveyance of boats to the sea; also to provide, through a local committee, for the proper management of each boat and the exercising of its crew. The Institution also grants money, medals, votes of thanks to those who have risked life in the effort to save shipwrecked men. It collects and turns to account the newest and best information on the construction of life-boats, the management of boats in surf and storm, the best method of restoring animation to drowned men in whom a spark of life may linger, and whatever else may be found serviceable to the cause it represents.

There have been reported to the committee of this Institution, by coast-guard officers and Lloyd's agents, sixty points upon our coast at which a life-boat station is still urgently required. Two years ago, the Institution possessed seventy boats. A year ago, it possessed eighty-one boats. At the annual meeting held this year, it was reported that the Institution had placed on the coast twelve more boats (one of which is the free gift of Miss Burdett Coutts), and had others in course of building, which would raise the force of their fleet to one hundred and one, the largest life-saving fleet that the world has ever seen. Each boat, apart from any help it might give to a wreck, has been

shout from the interior of the wood showed us we were right, as Oldbuck, quoting Chaucer, a sure sign of his being in the highest spirits, made a plunge among the firs, and I followed him.

Here was the Briton's burying-place-a low mound, covered with scanty grass, and brown fir needles, and resinous scaly fir cones, and just a violet or two. It had been nibbled away by time, and rains, and heat, and the friction of winds, and rabbits' feet, and foxes' scratching, until it was a mere small wen of earth, half hidden among the coppery fir-trees. Very many centuries ago, that mound was soft fresh earth, and warm tears fell fast upon its surface. You have slept long enough, very Ancient Briton; it is time for you to rise. It is a fine morning. You will find the country improved. Steam, sir, that wonderful invention, has revolutionised the world. I will lend you Pinnock's Catechism, and you shall read the History of the Norman Conquest, my good man.

The two keepers, who look like the sextons in Hamlet, are of a coppery, winter-apple colour, and are of a strong build, well adapted for grappling with poachers. They both wear brown velveteen jackets, stained with hare's blood, and smeared with fish slime, and their legs are cased in hard leather gaiters that look like greaves of rusty iron. To it they go, as if digging for treasure, paring off the pads of turf, chopping at the clawing roots of the firs, and picking out the broken bones of mother earth, which men call flints.

Oldbuck advised at once cutting to the centre of the mound, on the Colt Hoare principle, in order to reach the central burial-chamber, which is generally found constructed of four square stones. We opened, therefore, two trenches, one in a perpendicular, and the other in a horizontal direction, so as to meet in the centre.

Oldbuck took a shovel, I took a spade, and we worked as well as the best; no navigators ever earned their wages more satisfactorily than we did. The elder keeper, with the white moth trout-flies round his rusty hat, toiled after us in vain. We soon came upon the remains of bodies: at first merely small finger-bones, brown, and not unlike the mouthpieces of pipes: then the ends of ribs, protruding like roots from the slabs of clay then, empty boxes of skulls, men's and women's then puzzle-pieces of disjointed vertebræ. Oldbuck was in raptures.

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Some bits of rude, black, unglazed pottery were next thrown up, and the brown bones, piled up at the foot of a fir-tree, began to grow into a heap that, put together, would have been sufficient to build up six or seven human beings. But bronze spear-head, or brooch, or Celt axe, we found not, much to Oldbuck's mortification. I could not help thinking that as for the glazed pottery it looked wonderfully like the fragment of a modern Briton's black teapot; but I dared not say so to Oldbuck, who was hanging over it as Romeo might have done over Juliet's glove. It was certainly the base of some culinary vessel, rudely fashioned into a round

shape, and totally without ornament-not even that toothed edge, which so resembles the decoration round the edge of a beef-steak pie, and which the modern cook's knife so readily exe

cutes.

As for the leg-bones which left moulds of themselves in the clay they had so long been imbedded in, they were sadly crumbly. and porous; white thread-like roots of bent grass had crept into their sockets, and the blue poisonous fibres of couch-grass had grown through their tubes, and matted round the caps of the thigh bones. But the skulls, some male and some female, sent Oldbuck into paroxysms of theories and into prophetical utterances of new ethnological systems.

They were unquestionably curious, and adapted to set one thinking over the dwellers in the wattled houses, and the blue-stained men who trod the pleasant downs of Ramshire many centuries ago. Oldbuck declared violently that they served to establish ingenious Mr. Wright's theory about the deformed skulls found at Uriconium, where the Roman swords had operated upon them.

They were of a mean ape-like character, low, flat, and with scarcely an inch of forehead, though the bones over the eyes (where the perceptive faculties are situated) were coarsely prominent. They might have belonged to a sort of aboriginal race, scarcely of greater mental capacity than the Bushman, that had been destroyed by the Celt. The bones of the male skulls were of enormous thickness-twice the thickness of skulls of our own day; so thick that a bronze axe could hardly have split them; while the female skulls were thin as terra-cotta, and fragile as delicate pie-crust. Oldbuck suggested that the men, bareheaded, were out all day in the fen and forest; while the women remained in their huts, so that their bones remained finer and softer. I reminded him of the old story in Herodotus, of the battle-field, when it was easy to tell the Persian's from the Egyptian's skull, because the one which had always been kept coddled in a turban was soft, and could be cracked by a stone, while the other, which had been ever exposed to the sun and wind, resisted the utmost degree of violence. Oldbuck, kneading some clay out of the cavity of a Briton's skull with his finger and thumb, said the story was "very well indeed," and he would make a note of it for his paper on the subject of this barrow.

Some teeth that we found, set Oldbuck off again. They were of a curious, low, animal kind, very narrow and long, more like the front incisor teeth of a beaver than a man's. They had belonged to a young man in the age before dentists; they were still covered with beautiful white enamel, and their edges were not the least worn-just a little deer's flesh the owner had gnawed; then, the struggle of swords, the blazing huts, the glare of the advancing eagle— darkness, and this long sleep under the mound.

All the while that we mused and ravelled out our dim theories, the fir wood was pulsing with the brooding motherly note of innumerable wood-pigeons, the leaping squirrels eyed us