soothe the wrecker, to persuade the smuggler, and to “handle serpents,” in my intercourse with adversaries of many a kind. Thank God! the promises which the clergy inherit from their Founder cannot fail to be fulfilled. It was never prophesied that they should be popular, or wealthy, or successful among men; but only that they “should endure to the end,” that “their generation should never pass away.” Well has this word been kept! Among my parishioners there were certain individuals who might be termed representative men,--quaint and original characters, who embodied in their own lives the traditions and the usages of the parish. One of these had been for full forty years a wrecker--that is to say, a watcher of the sea and rocks for flotsam and jetsam, and other unconsidered trifles which the waves might turn up to reward the zeal and vigilance of a patient man. His name was Peter Burrow, a man of harmless and desultory life, and by no means identified with the cruel and covetous natives of the strand, with whom it was a matter of pastime to lure a vessel ashore by a treacherous light, or to withhold succour from the seaman struggling with the sea. He was the companion of many of my walks, and the witness with myself of more than one thrilling and perilous scene. Another of my parish notorieties, the hero of contraband adventure, and agent for sale of smuggled cargoes in bygone times, was Tristram Pentire,[47] a name known to the readers of these pages. With a merry twinkle of the eye, and in a sharp and ringing tone, it was old Tristram’s usage to recount for my instruction such tales of wild adventure and of “derring-do” as would make the foot of an exciseman falter and his cheek turn pale. But both these cronies of mine were men devoid of guile, and in their most reckless of escapades innocent of mischievous harm. It was not long after my arrival in my new abode that I was plunged all at once into the midst of a fearful scene of the terrors of the sea. About daybreak of an autumn day I was aroused by a knock at my bedroom-door; it was followed by the agitated voice of a boy, a member of my household, “Oh, sir, there are dead men on vicarage rocks!”