323 [January 29, 1860.] ALL THE YEAR ROUND. [Conducted by

to the bottom. On the shore by the water's
edge, was a rough tent, made of fragments of
wreck, where other divers and workmen, shel-
tered themselves, and where they had kept
Christmas-day with rum and roast beef, to the
destruction of their frail chimney. Cast up
among the stones and boulders of the beach,
were great spars of the lost vessel, and masses
of iron twisted by the fury of the sea into
the strangest forms. The timber was already
bleached and the iron rusted, and even these
objects did no violence to the prevailing air the
whole scene wore, of having been exactly the
same for years and years.

Yet, only two short months had gone, since a
man, living on the nearest hill-top overlooking-
the sea, being blown out of bed at about day-
break by the wind that had begun to strip his
roof off, and getting upon a ladder with his
nearest neighbour to construct some temporary
device for keeping his house over his head, saw,
from the ladder's elevation as he looked down
by chance towards the shore, some dark
troubled object close in with the land. And he
and the other, descending to the beach, and
finding the sea mercilessly beating over a great
broken ship, had clambered up the stony ways
like staircases without stairs, on which the
wild village hangs in little clusters, as fruit
hangs on boughs, and had given the alarm. And
so, over the hill-slopes, and past the waterfall,
and down the gullies where the land drains off
into the ocean, the scattered quarrymen and fisher-
men inhabiting that part of Wales had come
running to the dismal sight—their clergyman
among them. And as they stood in the leaden
morning, stricken with pity, leaning hard against
the wind, their breath and vision often failing as
the sleet and spray rushed at them from the ever
forming and dissolving mountains of sea, and
as the wool which was a part of the vessel's
cargo blew in with the salt foam and remained
upon the land when the foam melted, they
saw the ship's life-boat put off from one of the
heaps of wreck; and first, there were three men
in her, and in a moment she capsized, and there
were but two; and again, she was struck by a
vast mass of water, and there was but one; and
again, she was thrown bottom upward, and that
one, with his arm struck through the broken
planks and waving as if for the help that could
never reach him, went down into the deep.

It was the clergyman himself from whom I
heard this, while I stood on the shore, looking in
his kind wholesome face as it turned to the spot
where the boat had been. The divers were down
then, and busy. They were "lifting" to-day,
the gold found yesterday—some five-and-
twenty thousand pounds. Of three hundred
and fifty thousand pounds worth of gold, three
hundred thousand pounds worth, in round
numbers, was at that time recovered. The great
bulk of the remainder was surely and steadily
coming up. Some loss of sovereigns there would
be, of course; indeed, at first sovereigns had
drifted in with the sand, and been scattered far
and wide over the beach, like sea-shells; but most

other golden treasure would be found. As it was
brought up, it went aboard the Tug steamer,
where good account was taken of it. So tre-
mendous had the force of the sea been when it
broke the ship, that it had beaten one great
ingot of gold, deep into a strong and heavy piece
of her solid iron-work: in which, also, several
loose sovereigns that the ingot had swept in
before it, had been found, as firmly embedded as
though the iron had been liquid when they were
forced there. It had been remarked of such
bodies come ashore, too, as had been seen by
scientific men, that they had been stunned to
death, and not suffocated. Observation, both of
the internal change that had been wrought in
them, and of their external expression, showed
death to have been thus merciful and easy. The
report was brought, while I was holding such
discourse on the beach, that no more bodies had
come ashore since last night. It began to be
very doubtful whether many more would be
thrown up, until the north-east winds of the
early spring set in. Moreover, a great number
of the passengers, and particularly the second-
class women-passengers, were known to have
been in the middle of the ship when she parted,
and thus the collapsing wreck would have fallen
upon them after yawning open, and would keep
them down. A diver made known, even then,
that he had come upon the body of a man, and
had sought to release it from a great superin-
cumbent weight; but that, finding he could not
do so without mutilating the remains, he had
left it where it was.

It was the kind and wholesome face I have
made mention of as being then beside me, that
I had purposed to myself to see, when I left
home for Wales. I had heard of that clergyman,
as having buried many scores of the shipwrecked
people; of his having opened his house and
heart to their agonised friends; of his having used
a most sweet and patient diligence for weeks and
weeks, in the performance of the forlornest offices
that Man can render to his kind; of his having
most tenderly and thoroughly devoted himself to
the dead, and to those who were sorrowing for
the dead. I had said to myself, " In the Christ-
mas season of the year, I should like to see
that man!" And he had swung the gate of his
little garden in coming out to meet me, not half
an hour ago.

So cheerful of spirit, and guiltless of affecta-
tion, as true practical Christianity ever is! I
read more of the New Testament in the fresh
frank face going up the village beside me, in
five minutes, than I have read in anathematising
discourses (albeit put to press with enormous
flourishing of trumpets), in all my life. I heard
more of the Sacred Book in the cordial voice
that had nothing to say about its owner, than in
all the would-be celestial pairs of bellows that
have ever blown conceit at me.

We climbed towards the little church, at a
cheery pace, among the loose stones, the deep
mud, the wet coarse grass, the outlying water,
and other obstructions from which frost and
snow had lately thawed. It was a mistake (my