The race of secular guides across the Kent began, after the surrender of Cartmel Priory, with Thomas Tempest. Son succeeded father in the office, but they seem soon afterwards to have become Carters; probably having adopted the name from their official title. The poet Gray, touring the Lake Country in 1769, relates a pathetic story of a family overtaken by the mists half-way across the Sands: “An old fisherman told me, in his dialect, a moving story, how a brother of the trade—a cockler, as he styled him—driving a little cart with his two daughters (women grown) in it, and his wife on horseback following, set out one day to cross the Sands, as they had been frequently used to do (for nobody in the village knew them better than the old man did). When they were about half-way over, a thick fog rose, and as they advanced they found the water much deeper than they expected. The old man was puzzled. He stopped, and said he would go a little way to find some mark he was acquainted with. They stayed awhile for him, but in vain. They called aloud, but no reply. At last the young women pressed their mother to think where they were, and go on. She would not leave the place. She wandered about, forlorn and amazed. She would not quit her horse and get into the cart with them. They determined, after much time wasted, to turn back, and gave themselves up to the guidance of their horses. The elder woman was soon washed off, and perished. The girls clung close to their cart, and the horse, sometimes wading and sometimes swimming, brought them back to land alive, but senseless with terror and distress, and unable for many days to give an account of themselves. The bodies of the parents were found the next ebb, that of the father a very few paces distant from the spot where he had left them.” [Illustration: LANCASTER SANDS. [_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._ ] The story is still remembered how, in the days when coaches crossed Grange Sands at low water, an outside passenger lost his portmanteau and excitedly jumped down after it, becoming half-engulfed in the treacherous quicksands. He would probably have perished, had the guard, used to the place, not come to his rescue, and pulled him out, with a resounding “cluck,” similar to the noise made when drawing a cork. [Sidenote: _TRAGEDIES THE OF THE SANDS_]