however, had a grim and angry aspect, just such an expression as would verify the truth of our suspicion that he had been driven by others to forsake his deck. Then arrived the mate and three other men of the crew. None were placid of feature or calm and pleasant in look, as those usually are who are accidentally drowned, or who die in their beds. But one day my strange old man, Peter Barrow, came to me in triumphant haste with the loud greeting, “Sir! we have got a noble corpse down on your beach. We have just laid him down above high-water mark, and he is as comely a body as a man shall see!” I made haste to the spot; and there lay, with the light of a calm and wintry day falling on his manly form, a fine and stately example of a man: he was six feet two inches in height, of firm and accurate proportion throughout; and he must have been, indeed, in life a shape of noble symmetry and grace. On his broad smooth chest was tattooed a rood, that is to say, our blessed Saviour on His cross, with on the one hand His mother, and on the other St. John the Evangelist: underneath were the initial letters of a name, P. B. His arms also were marked with tracery in the same blue lines. On his right arm was engraved P. B. again, and E. M., the letters linked with a wreath; and on his left arm was an anchor, as I imagined the symbol of hope, and the small blue forget-me-not flower. The greater number of my dead sailors—and I have myself said the burial-service over forty-two such men rescued from the sea—were so decorated with some distinctive emblem and name; and it is their object and intent, when they assume these signs, to secure identity for their bodies if their lives are lost at sea. We carried the strangely decorated man to his comrades of the deck; and gradually in the course of one month we discovered and carefully buried the total crew of nine strong men. These gathered strangers, the united assemblage from many a distant and diverse abode, now calmly slept among our rural and homely graves, the stout seamen of the ship _Alonzo_ of Stockton-on-Tees. The boat which had foundered with them we brought also to the churchyard; and there, just by their place of rest, we placed her beside them, keel upward to the sky, in token that her work, too, was over, and her voyage done. There her timbers slowly moulder still; and by-and-by her dust will mingle in the scenery of death with the ashes of those living hearts and hands that manned her, in their last unavailing launch, and fruitless struggle for the mastery of life.[30] But the history of the _Alonzo_ is not yet closed. Three years afterwards a letter arrived from the Danish consul at a neighbouring seaport town, addressed to myself as the vicar of the parish; and the hope of the writer was that he might be