In a moment I was up, and in my dressing-gown and slippers rushed out. There stood my lad, weeping bitterly, and holding out to me in his trembling hands a tortoise alive. I found afterwards that he had grasped it on the beach, and brought it in his hand as a strange and marvellous arrival from the waves, but in utter ignorance of what it might be. I ran across my glebe, a quarter of a mile, to the cliffs, and down a frightful descent of three hundred feet to the beach. It was indeed a scene to be looked on once only in a human life. On a ridge of rock, just left bare by the falling tide, stood a man, my own servant; he had come out to see my flock of ewes, and had found the awful wreck. There he stood, with two dead sailors at his feet, whom he had just drawn out of the water stiff and stark. The bay was tossing and seething with a tangled mass of rigging, sails, and broken fragments of a ship; the billows rolled up yellow with corn, for the cargo of the vessel had been foreign wheat; and ever and anon there came up out of the water, as though stretched out with life, a human hand and arm. It was the corpse of another sailor drifting out to sea. “Is there no one alive?” was my first question to my man. “I think there is, sir,” he said, “for just now I thought I heard a cry.” I made haste in the direction he pointed out, and, on turning a rock, just where a brook of fresh water fell towards the sea, there lay the body of a man in a seaman’s garb. He had reached the water faint with thirst, but was too much exhausted to swallow or drink. He opened his eyes at our voices, and as he saw me leaning over him in my cassock-shaped dressing-gown, he sobbed, with a piteous cry, “O mon père, mon père!” Gradually he revived, and when he had fully come to himself with the help of cordials and food, we gathered from him the mournful tale of his vessel and her wreck. He was a Jersey man by birth, and had been shipped at Malta, on the homeward voyage of the vessel from the port of Odessa with corn. I had sent in for brandy, and was pouring it down his throat, when my parishioner, Peter Burrow, arrived. He assisted, at my request, in the charitable office of restoring the exhausted stranger; but when he was refreshed and could stand upon his feet, I remarked that Peter did not seem so elated as in common decency I expected he would be. The reason soon transpired. Taking me aside, he whispered in my ear, “Now, sir, I beg your pardon, but if you’ll take my advice, now that man is come to himself, if I were you I would let him go his way wherever he will. If you take him into your house, he’ll surely do you some harm.” Seeing my surprise, he went on to explain, “You don’t know, sir,” he said, “the saying on our coast-- “‘Save a stranger from the sea, And he’ll turn your enemy.’