sought their homes with sad hearts. The light keeper, Mr. Hamilton, coming down from the lighthouse tower at midnight, where he had been to attend to the lamps, decided to visit the beach again, thinking possibly that some of the bodies of the lost sailors might drift to shore. What was his surprise to find upon a piece of the cabin of the ship, which had washed ashore, a helpless sailor moaning piteously, still alive but suffering terribly from the hardships he had endured; he had been scratched and torn by the broken timbers through which he had been washed and driven. After great exertion and a long struggle the lightkeeper succeeded in getting the unfortunate sailor up the cliff and to the lighthouse, where the man was put to bed and a physician sent for. He finally recovered, but he was the only man of that ship’s company of 24 souls who escaped with life, these and the two men who attempted a rescue made a total death list in this disaster of 25. It is a far cry from 1849 to 1872, and the broken timbers of many a lost ship, and the whitened bones of hundreds of dead sailors lie buried in the drifting sands of this storm beaten coast, between those dates, but as we cannot here present the details of more than a very few of them, we only select those having especial and somewhat different features and so pathetic as to stand out more prominently than those of a lesser degree of horror, though it would be hard to describe a shipwreck on this coast devoid of suffering, death and destruction. THE CLARA BELL On the afternoon of March 6th, 1872, a moderate wind was blowing from the land across the sea, the sun shone full and clear, a great fleet of sailing vessels, urged forward by the favoring breeze, made rapid progress over the smooth sea towards their destination. In the late afternoon, as the sun approached the western horizon, it settled behind a dark and ominous cloud that was rising towards the zenith and casting a dark shadow over all the sea. [Illustration: WRECK OF THE CLARA BELL] The two masted schooner Clara Bell, Captain Amesbury, with a cargo of coal for Boston, had that morning sailed out of the harbor of Vineyard Haven and passed across the shoals of Vineyard Sound, moved rapidly up the coast, and by ten o’clock that night was nearly opposite Highland Light. The wind, which had been only fairly strong up to this time, rapidly increased in velocity, and snow began falling thick and fast.