“A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the bogus ‘Emigration Agencies’ among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more remote provinces of Austria.  The object of these scoundrels was to get hold of the poor ignorant people’s homesteads, and they were in league with the local usurers.  They exported their victims through Hamburg mostly.  As to the ship, I had watched her out of this very window, reaching close-hauled under short canvas into the bay on a dark, threatening afternoon.  She came to an anchor, correctly by the chart, off the Brenzett Coastguard station.  I remember before the night fell looking out again at the outlines of her spars and rigging that stood out dark and pointed on a background of ragged, slaty clouds like another and a slighter spire to the left of the Brenzett church-tower.  In the evening the wind rose.  At midnight I could hear in my bed the terrific gusts and the sounds of a driving deluge.

“About that time the Coastguardmen thought they saw the lights of a steamer over the anchoring-ground.  In a moment they vanished; but it is clear that another vessel of some sort had tried for shelter in the bay on that awful, blind night, had rammed the German ship amidships (a breach—­as one of the divers told me afterwards—­’that you could sail a Thames barge through’), and then had gone out either scathless or damaged, who shall say; but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal, to perish mysteriously at sea.  Of her nothing ever came to light, and yet the hue and cry that was raised all over the world would have found her out if she had been in existence anywhere on the face of the waters.

“A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy silence as of a neatly executed crime, characterise this murderous disaster, which, as you may remember, had its gruesome celebrity.  The wind would have prevented the loudest outcries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no time for signals of distress.  It was death without any sort of fuss.  The Hamburg ship, filling all at once, capsized as she sank, and at daylight there was not even the end of a spar to be seen above water.  She was missed, of course, and at first the Coastguardmen surmised that she had either dragged her anchor or parted her cable some time during the night, and had been blown out to sea.  Then, after the tide turned, the wreck must have shifted a little and released some of the bodies, because a child—­a little fair-haired child in a red frock—­came ashore abreast of the Martello tower.  By the afternoon you could see along three miles of beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in and out of the tumbling foam, and rough-looking men, women with hard faces, children, mostly fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and dripping, on stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long procession past the door of the ‘Ship Inn,’ to be laid out in a row under the north wall of the Brenzett Church.