In the following year a new and another wreck was announced in the gloom of night. A schooner under bare poles had been watched for many hours from the cliffs, with the steersman fastened at the wheel. All at once she tacked and made for the shore, and just as she had reached a creek between two reefs of rock, she foundered and went down. At break of day only her vane was visible to mark her billowy grave. Not a vestige could be seen of her crew. But in the course of the day her boat was drifted ashore, and we found from the name on the stern that the vessel was the _Phœnix_ of St. Ives. A letter from myself by immediate post brought up next day from that place a sailor who introduced himself as the brother of a young man who had sailed as mate in the wrecked ship. He was a rough plain-spoken man, of simple religious cast, without guile or pretence: one of the good old seafaring sort--the men who “go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters:” these, as the Psalmist chants, “see the wonders of the Lord, and His glories in the deep.” At my side he paced the shore day after day in weary quest of the dead. “If I could but get my poor brother’s bones,” he cried out yearningly again and again, “if I could but lay him in the earth, how it would comfort dear mother at home!” We searched every cranny in the rocks, and we watched every surging wave, until hope was exchanged for despair. A reward of meagre import, it is true, offered by the Seaman’s Burial Act, to which I have referred, and within my own domain doubled always by myself, brought us many a comrade in this sickening scrutiny, but for long it was in vain. At last one day, while we were scattered over a broken stretch of jumbled rocks that lay in huddled masses along the base of the cliffs, a loud and sudden shout called me where the seaman of St. Ives stood. He was gazing down into the broken sea--it was on a spot near low-water mark--and there, just visible from underneath a mighty fragment of rock, was seen the ankle of a man and a foot still wearing a shoe. “It is my brother!” yelled the sailor, bitterly; “it is our own dear Jem--I can swear to that shoe!” We gathered around; the tide ebbed a very little after this discovery, and only just enough to leave dry the surface of the rock under which the body lay. Soon the sea began again to flow, and very quickly we were driven by the rising surges from the spot. The anguish of the mourner for his dead was thrilling to behold and terrible to hear. “O my brother! my brother!” was his sob again and again; “what a burial-place for our own dear merry boy!” I tried to soothe him, but in vain: the only theme to which he could be brought to listen was the chance--and I confess it seemed to my own secret mind a hopeless thought--that it might be possible at the next ebb-tide, by skill and strength combined, to move, if ever so little, the monstrous rock, and so recover the corpse. It was low water at