The people of the shore, after having done their best to search for survivors and to discover the lost bodies, gathered up fragments of the wreck for fuel and shouldered them away; not perhaps a lawful spoil, but a venal transgression when compared with the remembered cruelties of Cornish wreckers. Then ensued my interview with the rescued man. His name was Le Daine. I found him refreshed, collected and grateful. He told me his tale of the sea. The captain and all the crew but himself were from Arbroath in Scotland. To that harbour also the vessel belonged. She had been away on a two-years’ voyage, employed in the Mediterranean trade. She had loaded last at Odessa. She touched at Malta; and there Le Daine, who had been sick in the hospital, but recovered, had joined her. There also the captain had engaged a Portuguese cook; and to this man, as one link in a chain of causes, the loss of the vessel might be ascribed. He had been wounded in a street quarrel the night before the vessel sailed from Malta and lay disabled and useless in his cabin throughout the homeward voyage. At Falmouth, whither they were bound for orders, the cook died. The captain and all the crew, except the cabin-boy, went ashore to attend the funeral. During their absence the boy, handling in his curiosity the barometer, had broken the tube and the whole of the quicksilver had run out. Had this instrument, the pulse of the storm, been preserved, the crew would have received warning of the sudden and unexpected hurricane and might have stood out to sea; whereas they were caught in the chops of the Channel, and thus, by this small incident, the vessel and the mariners found their fate on the rocks of a remote headland in my lonely parish. I caused Le Daine to relate in detail the closing events. “We received orders,” he said, “at Falmouth to make for Gloucester to discharge. The captain and mate and another of the crew were to be married on their return to their native town. They wrote, therefore, to Arbroath from Falmouth, to announce their safe arrival from their two-years’ voyage, and their hope in about a week to arrive at Arbroath for welcome there.” But in a day or two after this joyful letter there arrived in Arbroath a leaf torn out of my pocket-book and addressed “To the Owners of the Vessel the _Caledonia_ of Arbroath,” with the brief and thrilling tidings, written by myself in pencil, among the fragments of their wrecked vessel, that the whole crew, except one man, were lost “upon my rocks.” My note spread a general dismay in Arbroath, for the crew, from the clannish relationship among the Scotch, were connected with a large number of the inhabitants. But to return to the touching details of Le Daine.