the broken water.  Amidst all this the face of one woman who stood looking at the men arrested my attention.  It was very white, and her eyes had a look in them that I cannot describe, though I have seen it since in my sleep.  The men in the boat were her husband and her sons.  She said nothing, but kept her hands tightly clasped; and her lips parted every time the boat rose on the crown of a wave.  We could not see those good fellows half the time:  all we could tell was that the man who was sitting against the jacket had to bale very hard.  Presently the deep bow of the boat rose over a travelling sea, and she ground on the sand.  She was heavily laden with the brig’s crew of limp and shivering Danish seamen.  And it was not a moment too soon for her to be ashore:  the brig parted almost directly, and the wreckage was strewn all along the beach.

The men who did this action never had any reward.  And it did not matter; for they took a very moderate view of their own merits.  They knew, of course, that they had done a good morning’s work; but it never occurred to them that they ought to have a paragraph in the newspapers and be called brave.  The sort of courage they exhibited they would have described, if their attention had been called to it, as “only natural.”  The old hero who went through a heavy sea with a staved-in boat is still living.  His name is Big Tom, and his home is at Cresswell, in the county of Northumberland.  He does not know that he is at all heroic; but it is pleasant to think of him after reading about those wretched excursionists who drowned each other in sheer fright within sight of his home.  He has often saved life since then.  But when he puts out to sea now he does not need to use a stove-in coble:  he is captain of the smart lifeboat; and his proudest possession is a photograph which shows his noble figure standing at the bow.

THE FISHERWOMAN.

On bleak mornings you might see the movements of Peggy’s stooping figure among the glistening brown weeds that draped the low rocks; and somehow you always noticed her most on bleak mornings.  When the joy of the summer was in the air, and the larks were singing high up in the sky, it seemed rather pleasant than otherwise to paddle about among the quiet pools and on the cold bladder-wrack.  But when the sky was leaden, and the wind rolled with strange sounds down the chill hollows, it was rather pitiful to see a barefooted woman tramping in those bitter places.  The sea seemed to wait for every fresh lash of the blast; and when the grey water sprang into brief spurts of spray you felt how cruelly Peggy’s bare limbs were cut by the wind.  But she took it all kindly, and made no moan about anything.  Towards eight o’clock you would meet her tramping over the sand with her great creel full of bait slung on her forehead.  Her feet gripped at the sand, and her strong leg looked ruddy and hard.  Her hands were