"God have mercy upon the poor fellows at sea; upon the shipwrecked in their dismal peril; upon the brave Storm Warriors speeding out in danger and hardship!" this is the prayer that indeed often finds utterance, when the sleeper is awakened in the dark hours of the night by the howling of the wind or the boom of the signal gun. And at Ramsgate the prayer may be uttered fervently indeed by those, who, when they hear the signal of distress, know that the endangered vessel is experiencing all the dread dangers of the Goodwin Sands, for the vessels wrecked upon them have indeed, if the weather is bad, but a poor prospect of ever sailing the broad seas again. The Goodwin is a quick-sand, and it is this, as well as the tremendous sea that beats upon it in heavy weather, that makes it so terribly fatal to vessels that get stranded on it. At low tide a portion of the sand is dry, and hard, and firm, and can be walked on for a distance of about four or five miles; but as the water again flows over any part of it, that part becomes, as the sailors say, "all alive," soft and quick, and ready to suck in anything that lodges upon it. Suppose a vessel to run on with a falling tide, where the sand shelves, or is steep, the water leaves the bow and the sand there gets hard; the water still flows under the stern, and the sand there remains soft a longer time; down the stern sinks lower and lower; the vessel soon breaks her back, or works herself deeper and deeper by the stern; as the water rises she fills and works and still sinks deeper in the sand every roll she gives, until at high tide she is, perhaps, completely buried, or only her topmasts are seen above water. Other vessels, if the sea is heavy, begin to beat heavily, and soon break up. Lifted up on the swell of a huge wave, as it breaks and flies away in surf and foam, the vessel thumps down with all its weight upon the sands, the timbers give and strain, the seams open; she soon ceases, as she fills with water, to rise upon the wave; great gaps are torn from the bulwarks; the decks burst open with the air seeking to escape from the hold, and as the sea rushes over the vessel, each roll she gives wrenches her more and more; the masts fall over the side; her cargo floats and washes away, and speedily, even in a few hours, she is in a torn and shattered condition, completely wrecked and destroyed. The broken hull is full of water and lurches heavily to and fro with each wave, rolls and slightly lifts and works, until it has made a deep bed in the Sands in which it is soon completely buried--so that many vessels have run upon the Sands in the early night, and scarcely a vestige of them been seen in the morning.