Charles Dickens.] ALL THE YEAR ROUND. [January 23, 1860.] 323

friend was glad to tell me, on the way) to sup-
pose that the peasantry had shown any super-
stitious avoidance of the drowned; on the whole,
they had done very well, and had assisted
readily. Ten shillings had been paid for the
bringing of each body up to the church, but the
way was steep, and a horse and a cart (in which,
it was wrapped in a sheet) were necessary, and
three or four men, and, all things considered,
it was not a great price. The people were none
the richer for the wreck, for it was the season of
the herring-shoal—and who could cast nets for
fish, and find dead men and women in the
draught?

He had the church keys in his hand, and
opened the churchyard gate, and opened the
church door; and we went in.

It is a little church of great antiquity; there
is reason to believe that some church has occu-
pied the spot, these thousand years or more.
The pulpit was gone, and other things usually
belonging to the church were gone, owing to
its living congregation having deserted it for the
neighbouring schoolroom, and yielded it up to
the dead. The very Commandments had been
shouldered out of their places, in the bringing
in of the dead; the black wooden tables on
which they were painted, were askew, and on
the stone pavement below them, and on the
stone pavement all over the church, were the
marks and stains where the drowned had been
kid down. The eye, with little or no aid from
the imagination, could yet see how the bodies
had been turned, and where the head had been
and where the feet. Some faded traces of the
wreck of the Australian ship may be discernible
on the stone pavement of this little church,
hundreds of years hence, when the digging for
gold in Australia shall have long and long ceased
out of the land.

Forty-four shipwrecked men and women lay
here at one time, awaiting burial. Here, with
weeping and wailing in every room of his house,
my companion worked alone for hours, solemnly
surrounded by eyes that could not see him, and
by lips that could not speak to him, patiently exa-
mining the tattered clothing, cutting off buttons,
hair, marks from linen, anything that might
lead to subsequent identification, studying faces,
looking for a scar, a bent finger, a crooked toe,
comparing letters sent to him with the rain
about him. "My dearest brother had bright
grey eyes and a pleasant smile," one sister wrote.
poor sister! well for you to be far from here,
and keep that as your last remembrance of
him!

The ladies of the clergyman's family, his wife
and two sisters-in-law, came in among the bodies
often. It grew to be the business of their lives to
do so. Any new arrival of a bereaved woman
would stimulate their pity to compare the
description brought, with the dread realities.
Sometimes, they would go back, able to say, " I
have found him," or, "I think she lies there."
Perhaps, the mourner, unable to bear the sight
of all that lay in the church, would be led in
blindfold. Conducted to the spot with many com-

passionate words, and encouraged to look, she
would say, with a piercing cry, " This is my
boy!" and drop insensible on the insensible
figure.

He soon observed that in some cases of
women, the identification of person, though
complete, was quite at variance with the marks
upon the linen; this led him to notice that even
the marks upon the linen were sometimes incon-
sistent with one another; and thus he came to
understand that they had dressed in great haste
and agitation, and that their clothes had become
mixed together. The identification of men by
their dress, was rendered extremely difficult, in
consequence of a large proportion of them being
dressed alike—in clothes of one kind, that is to
say supplied by slopsellers and outfitters, and not
made by single garments but by hundreds. Many
of the men were bringing over parrots, and had
receipts upon them for the price of the birds;
others had bills of exchange in their pockets, or
in belts. Some of these documents, carefully
unwrinkled and dried, were little less fresh in
appearance that day, than the present page will
be under ordinary circumstances, after having
been opened three or four times.

In that lonely place, it had not been easy to
obtain even such common commodities in towns,
as ordinary disinfectants. Pitch had been burnt
in the church, as the readiest thing at hand, and
the frying-pan in which it had bubbled over a
brazier of coals was still there, with its ashes.
Hard by the Communion-Table, were some boots
that had been taken off the drowned and pre-
served—a gold-digger's boot, cut down the leg
for its removal a trodden down man's ankle-
boot with a buff cloth top—and others—soaked
and sandy, weedy and salt.

From the church, we passed out into the
churchyard. Here, there lay, at that time, one
hundred and forty-five bodies, that had come
ashore from the wreck. He had buried them,
when not identified, in graves containing four
each. He had numbered each body in a register
describing it, and had placed a corresponding
number on each coffin, and over each grave.
Identified bodies he had buried singly, in private
graves, in another part of the churchyard.
Several bodies had been exhumed from the graves
of four, as relatives had come from a distance
and seen his register; and, when recognised, these
had been reburied in private graves, so that the
mourners might erect separate headstones over
the remains. In all such cases he had performed
the funeral service a second time, and the ladies
of his house had attended. There had been no
offence in the poor ashes when they were brought
again to the light of day; the beneficent Earth
had already absorbed it. The drowned were
buried in their clothes. To supply the great
sudden demand for coffins, he had got all the
neighbouring people handy at tools, to work the
livelong day, and Sunday likewise. The coffins
were neatly formed; I had seen two, waiting
for occupants, under the lee of the ruined walls
of a stone hut on the beach, within call of the
tent where the Christmas Feast was held.