Should there not be sufficient articles found by the coast-guard to make it worth their while to call in an auctioneer, they hold an auction of their own; but, not being licensed, they cannot run the price of the articles _up_, they therefore run them _down_. For instance, a piece of wood comes ashore, worth, may be, half a crown. The coast-guard offers it for ten shillings; and, if no one will give that for it, it is offered for nine, then eight, and so on, after the manner of a cheap-jack. I had got as far as this in my memoir on Saturday night, 13th Nov., 1875. On the following morning I went to Morwenstow, to take duty in the church. The wind was blowing a hurricane from the south-west. I had to hold on to the grave-stones, to drag myself through the churchyard in the teeth of the storm, to the church porch. There were few present that morning. No woman could have faced the wind. The roar of the ocean, the howling of the blast, the clatter of the glass in the windows, united, formed such a volume of sound that I had to shout my loudest to be heard when reading the service. When morning prayer was over, I went into the porch. A few men were there, holding their hats on their heads, and preparing for a battle with the wind. “Not many at church this morning,” I said. “No, your honour,” was the answer; “the wind would blow the women away; and the men are most of ’em on the cliffs, looking out if there be wrecks.” Two vessels were caught sight of between the scuds of rain, now on the top of a billow, then lost in the trough of the waves. They had been driven within the fatal line between Hartland Head and Padstowe Point. “Is there no chance for them?” “None at all.” That evening we sang in church the hymn for those at sea, in “Ancient and Modern.” Whilst it was being sung, one vessel foundered; but the crew, six Frenchmen, came ashore in a boat. An hour or two earlier the other went down, with all hands on board. On Monday and Tuesday bits of the wreck came up in the coves, with _Wilhelmina_ on them, but no bodies. After a storm the corpses are fearfully mangled on the sharp rocks, and are cut to pieces by the slate as by knives, and bits of flesh come ashore. These are locally called “gobbets”; and Mr. Hawker, after a wreck, used to send a man with a basket along the beaches of the coves in his parish, collecting these “gobbets,” which he interred in his churchyard, on top of the cliffs. In 1845, after a wreck, nine corpses were taken into Poundstock Church. The incumbent was wont to have daily service. The nine corpses lay along in the aisle that morning. It was the twenty-second day of the month, and he read the Psalm cvii.:—