The last news was so overwhelming--so unexpected and improbable after the early telegram--that at first it was received with some amount of incredulity. No other paper of that morning but the _Times_ contained the intelligence; and from behind this fact there came a gleam of hope. At about eleven o'clock, however, the journals issued as usual their second editions, and then it was the statement in the _Times_ was confirmed, and that the mournfullest piece of news in connection with marine disaster which ever reached this country was generally accepted. The 'Royal Charter' was lost! Men passed the news from one to another in whispers, shook their heads, and moved on to the newspaper and telegraph offices for later items bearing upon the calamity. The announcement in the first edition of the _Times_ was sad enough. Such details, however, as that journal was enabled to give in its second edition far more than confirmed the early telegram. Instead of only four hundred persons being on board, it appeared there were close upon five hundred, while the proportion of saved was not in the slightest increased. Some of the circumstances grouped around the wreck, too, were now supplied us. The vessel had, after a terrible battle with the storm, in which masts were cut down and much noble life was spent, struck upon the rocky coast of Wales, parted amidships, and gone down not twenty yards from shore, and scarcely four hours' sail from Liverpool. I was in Sydney when the 'Dunbar' was lost. I remember, with painful distinctness, the gloom cast upon the colony by that catastrophe. The same cold sense of horror seemed on Thursday last to take possession of the metropolis. At Lloyd's, at the Jerusalem, at the Baltic, men moved silently about with white faces and knitted brows. As each new telegram arrived and was posted in the rooms, groups would crowd anxiously around it, and amongst them--thrust forward with a most touching anxiousness--the face of many an old colonist could be seen. There was an element of uncertainty in the disaster which added to its painful and prostrating effect upon the public mind. The ship had brought eleven days' later news; there was no list of its passengers to be had in England; and who could tell but that his friends or kinsmen were on board? We all knew here the splendid qualities of the vessel: we all knew how high her colours stood in the colony. _I_ knew I had travelled the six hundred miles of dangerous sea between Sydney and Melbourne to make my journey home in her. Who then that had a relative or connection in the colony could--or _can_ to this hour--help the bleak conviction that in this vessel, which the cruel rocks have battered, and the remorseless waves have beaten to fragments, he or she was making a visit to the mother country? There were many of course that Thursday morning at Lloyd's, and the colonial coffee-houses, who by the last mail had received letters from friends