began to understand that they are responsible for its preservation. In its rich and prosperous days the walls enclosed the whole of the promontory on which the Priory ruins stand; but now there remain only a small lady-chapel, a few scattered walls, a portion of a groined roof, a fine Norman gateway, and a magnificent remnant of the church. In the grounds where the monks formerly took their exercise red-coated soldiers may now be seen at drill. Pyramids of cannon-balls are piled amid the ruins; there is a large powder-magazine beside what may have been the entrance to the church. It is now fortified and garrisoned, in fact, this promontory where the godly men of old looked away over the wild North Sea. The Tynemouth cliffs have thus, it may be presumed, been brought back to their earliest uses, for the Romans had a station here, and before the Romans came the Britons must have had a camp on the spot, since recent excavations have revealed the existence of British graves. Shooting outward from the Tynemouth shore, the mighty rampart of the North Pier makes division between the river and the sea. Such another pier comes outward from South Shields; and between them these two great works of engineering make a comparatively narrow channel for ships where there was formerly a wide and most dangerous estuary. Terrible indeed are the storms which sometimes rage over them and assail them with the battery of their waves. In a north-east gale the white water leaps above the summit of the Tynemouth cliffs. Outside the piers and beyond the bar the waves seem to be miles long, and when they narrow themselves to enter the river they rise to a height so appalling that the topmasts of a sailing-ship running for shelter may, with every dip the vessel makes, be lost to the view of those on shore. "The next instant," says Mr. Clark Russell, of a ship which he had been watching from Tynemouth when a storm was raging, "she had disappeared, and before another minute had passed I was straining my eyes against the whirling snow and looking into a blackness as empty as fog, amid which the pouring of the hurricane against the cliffs, and the pounding of the ponderous surges a long distance down, sounded with fearful distinctness. For three-quarters of an hour I lingered, peering to right and left of the beach at my feet, as far as the smother of flying flakes would let me look. But I saw no more of the brig." Such incidents were mournfully common before the piers were carried out to their present length. The Tyne was notorious for the number of its wrecks. No more than nine or ten years ago, indeed, I saw fourteen ships ashore in or near the mouth of the river, the spoils of a single night of storm. But this was the last occasion of so much calamity. For some years past now the Tyne has, most happily, almost been free from all disaster but collision.