In the autumn of 1872, an American full-rigged ship, bound to London, went ashore in Seaford Bay, in consequence of the captain mistaking the lights and (believing himself further up Channel) pointing her head N.E. before he ought to have done so. The vessel was lightly built—a mere bandbox of a craft—and, after beating and thumping for a short time close in shore, she became a total wreck. The masts went by the board, and, as she broke up, the sewing-machines, metal pails, and other “Yankee notions” with which she had been laden, were rolled and tumbled on the beach by the breakers in a pitiable condition and sad confusion. Amongst her cargo were a hundred casks of lamp-black; and at intervals one and another of these would burst with a crash, and the contents fly out in clouds, like smoke from a gun. The soft impalpable powder did not mix readily with the water, and was carried to the shore and inland by the strong sea-breeze. The coast-guards’ white buildings gradually assumed the hue of the inside of a boiler-flue; the beach, the grass, and the roads in the vicinity looked as if fifty thousand chimney-sweeps had emptied their soot-bags over them; and the stuff fell lightly and gently, like a dust shower, over the throng of anxious spectators, until the ladies appeared as if they were dressed in deep mourning for the catastrophe, and the faces of all, moistened by the salt spray, and bespattered and powdered with the subtle material, became as black as a negro’s, and as shiny as a well-blacked stove. A visitor arriving suddenly amongst them, without access to a looking-glass, might well have believed that he had discovered a colony of panic-stricken Christy minstrels. The sublime, the sorrowful, and the ridiculous have, perhaps, never been more intimately blended than in that scene of dashing, foaming breakers, tossed and battered wreckage, and smutted faces. Even Denys De Montfort’s “colossal poulpe,” which he described as deluging a ship from its syphon tube, would not have had an ink-bag large enough to produce such an effect by its contents. CHAPTER IX. ECONOMIC VALUE OF CUTTLE-FISHES. I will now try to answer M. Hugo’s question concerning “these blasphemies of creation against itself”—“Of what use are such creatures? What purpose do they serve?”