'Once,' said Peter, breaking the silence, 'there was a ship cast up by a wave right into the fork of the channel. She went to pieces in ten minutes, for she was held in a vice like, while the waves beat her into sticks. Some of the men got on to the north rock--what they call "Cuckoo"--and there they stuck till the gale abated. Then people saw them from Bryher, and a pilot-boat put off for them.' 'So they were saved?' said Roland. 'No, they were not saved,' Peter replied, slowly. ''Twas this way: the pilot-boat that took them off the rock capsized on the way home. So they was all drowned.' 'Poor beggars! Now, if they had been brought safe ashore we might have been told what these rocks look like in rough weather: and what Scilly is like when you have climbed it: and how a man feels in the middle of a storm on Scilly.' 'You can see very well what it is like from Samson,' said Armorel. 'The waves beat upon the rocks, and the white spray flies over them and hides them.' 'I should like to hear as well as to see,' said Roland. 'Fancy the thunder of the Atlantic waves against this mass of rock, the hissing and boiling in the channel, the roaring of the wind and the dashing of the waves! I wonder if any of these shipwrecked men had a sketch-book in his pocket. 'To be drowned,' he continued, 'just by the upsetting of a boat, and after escaping death in a much more exciting manner! Their companions were torn from the deck and hurled and dashed against the rock, so that in a moment their bones were broken to fragments, and the fragments themselves were thrown against the rocks till there was nothing left of them. And these poor fellows clung to the rock, hiding under a boulder from the driving wind--cold, starving, wet, and miserable. And just as they thought of food and shelter and warmth again, to be taken and plunged into the cold water, there to roll about till they were drowned! A dreadful tragedy!' Having thus broken the ice, Peter proceeded to relate more stories of shipwreck, taking after his father, Justinian Tryeth, whose conversational powers in this direction were, according to Armorel, unrivalled. There is a shipwreck story belonging to every rock of Scilly, and to many there are several shipwrecks. As there are about as many rocks of Scilly as there are days in the year, the stories would take long in the telling.