Charles Kingsley.

What is this Life at all, and what its purport? Is Good its aim or evil? If roses be fair, what need of thorns? God sends youth and health and beauty; what devil brings sickness, grief, and decay?

When I wrote the irrelevant, drowsy chapter preceding this, the sun shone so kindly, and so benignly Nature beamed, that Care was as a dream of what never could have been.

To live was to be blessed; to think was to enjoy. Nature was a doting mother that fed us with bounty and kissed us fondly to rest; the earth a sunny garden; heaven a waste of luxurious fancy.

How blind I must have been! What a glorious blindness it would be, if——

Ah! "If"!

My drop from the rosy clouds began pleasantly enough. I was nooning by the river-side, when an ancient, second-hand Danish pirate, with improbable pantomime whiskers, like tangled seaweed, fixedly looking at the lower part of my waistcoat, casually remarked, "Seems to me you're pining away down there."

"Yes," I answered briskly, "I'm not the man I was."

"No," said he meditatively, "we're none of us as young as we was; but, come, you can't be more than forty-three."

"I am," I answered indignantly, "no more than thirty-six."

"Well," said he, with what may have been a consolatory intent, "we can't help our looks, none of us. I'm judging you'll not be for the lifeboat when you're my age."

I had decided to speak to him no more, but an undefined hope to get the better of his sauciness prompted me to ask, "What age may that be?"

"Fifty-five," he answered.

"You look," said I vindictively, "a great deal older."

Scarce had the words left my mouth than I was ashamed of them. I saw for the first time now that he was crippled, and walked with a stick. Rough weather and a hard life had left on him a low-water mark of rust and wear and decay. But he answered, gently enough, "It's like enough I may. I've been very bad this three week. Got tangled in a rope and fell overboard, and was dragged ashore through the water from the pierhead to the harbour. My uncle and two other young fellows was in the boat, but"—

The "two other young fellows" was tempting, but I did not smile.

"They couldn't get me in," he continued unconsciously, "and I got knocked about a bit. My shoulder was main bad. I'm crawling about again, but it's hard work doing nothing."

I repeated the words to myself as I walked away, "hard work doing nothing"—especially when "doing nothing" means a bare cupboard and hungry children, eh?

Gorleston is perhaps not altogether so cheerful as I thought.

Unsneck the door to Care and you might as well take it off its hinges.

Late the same night, I was talking to the watchman at the end of the pier. A Yarmouth fishing-smack sailed out into the gloom.

"Rough night," the watchman cried to the skipper.

"Ay, ay," replied a gruff voice from below; and a moment later the smack was gone.

"Better here than on that boat to-night," I observed, as the black sail faded and merged in the black cloud.

"Ay," the watchman answered; "but they'll see worse before they see home again. There's queer weather to be found on the Dogger Bank in an eight weeks' trawling. I mind me of three hundred and sixty drowned in one March gale, and upwards of two hundred lost two or three years ago one Christmas night. Then there's always the risk of collisions in the fog, men washed overboard in a gale, or crippled in the small boat when they put out, as they must whatever the weather, when the Billingsgate steamer comes round in the night for the fish."

"H'm! And what pay sends willing men to face these risks?"

"Penny an hour, from time they start till they get back. That's fourteen shilling a week."

"And when they come home?"

"Pay stops."

"God! how can their women and children live?"

"Nay, now you're asking something. But they're better off than them as waits ashore all winter, and can't get a job."

"Fourteen shillings! Why do they stand it?"

"Because they can't help theirsels. There's too many waiting to take t' place o' them as has a job."

"Have they no trade union?"

"They've trouble enough to keep theirsels in work; who'd keep them if they went on strike?"

"Fourteen shillings a week! It's shameful."

"Happen it is, and happen the shame is not so much the men's as yours."

"Mine? How?"

"I suppose you buy and eat fish?"

"Yes, and pay the price I'm asked; if I paid twice as much, would the fishermen get the money?"

"Nay, I don't know. We look to you clever folk in London to settle these things."

They are not awe-struck by the superiority of the "clever folk from London," these outspoken men of the sea. From the taciturn solitary policeman, who looks on us with undisguised contempt, to the ancient mariners by the river-side, who gaze on us with the puzzled stare that a Viking might have cast on a French dancing-master, the natives give one the painful impression that they regard us as prodigies of ignorance and uselessness.

But—we have money. People who don't seem to know anything or to do anything always have. And they that have to wrest sustenance from the churlish sea at Gorleston, are disposed to do much for money—even to tolerate inquisitive, pompously patronising, incessantly cackling Cockneys.

I went down to the sea thinking to mend my tired body with the blow of the lusty spray, but I am judging 'twas perhaps my mind most needed change of air.

They are not so much our lungs that get stifled in the cities as our brains and hearts. We are so hemmed in with glittering shams and lies that we forget Truth's features.

What do we know of work and trade, we that scramble for gold dust in London? What do we know of Life, we that seek it in the perfumed mire and corruption of the West End? They are not the usurers and money-changers that make the wealth of nations, nor the painted splendours of Babylon that ripen our harvests, nor the swinish orgies of Sodom and Gomorrah that make the pulses beat with healthy joy of life.

One stews in London's vitiated atmosphere, and one forgets. One's perceptions grow numb, and dull and blunted; one's knowledge twisted, warped, awry. We are made dizzy by the rush and whirl, and cheated by specious shows and make-believes. Our days and nights are passed in fever, our thoughts are as the babbling of a grim delirium, and there is no health in us.

Contango? The odds for the Leger? The new ballet?

"We went out twice that night," said the lifeboatman; "one of our men broke his arm th' first trip, and he wur main wild when he couldn't go th' second time."

"And did you save them all?"

"Ay, we got 'em all off—both lots; though they'd give up hope. They couldn't see us till we came close up to them, for it was a dirty night, and the sea was running high, but they heard the cheers we give them when we got within calling distance, poor things."

That makes a better picture than the Stock Exchange or Piccadilly Circus. The thought of the ships that sink, of the men and women and children that go down into the cold depths, "their eyes and mouths to be filled with the brown sea sand"—that is not good to think of. But the picture of the rescue, is not that glorious?

The sound of the human cheer across the roar of Nature's battle—think of it in the ears of the crew that had "given up hope"! The thrill, the gladness, the doubt, the eager lookout. The cheer again, clearer, huskier, certain now, and full of brave comfort. A chance then for life? A chance for the wailing women and the weeping bairns? Then a glimpse, deep down in the great trough of the sea, of a boat staggering and rolling amidst the waves, manfully propelled, perceptibly approaching, despite wind and sleet and drenching wave, with rough men's voices giving promise of life through the darkness of the storm!

Ah! gentlemen of the Spiers & Pond and money-making world, isn't it a brave picture to think of? The cooling dash of ocean spray is delightfully refreshing. To think that our race can still breed heroes; that even we, if we could or would but shake off the Old Man of the Earth that sits upon our shoulders, might perhaps be heroes too; that we too might risk our lives to snatch storm-tossed unfortunates from the clutch of death—is it not a blessed thought?

It is the custom of our age to boast of its civilisation. When we stand erect we fear to hurtle the stars with our foreheads as we pass under. We smile upon our accumulations of wealth and the monuments of our commerce, and esteem ourselves the crowning triumphs of evolution, the ultimate perfection, Nature's finished masterpieces. But how small, how mean, and how insignificant we Londoners look by the side of these stalwart and fearless fishermen of Suffolk and Norfolk.

They know nothing of Westralians, S. P. prices, futures, or the Sisters Bobalink's new dance; but what a lot they have to teach us!

The weather changes swiftly at Gorleston, and when the white foam-horses ride over the hidden sand-banks, even a Cockney-tripper may feel the sense of peril.

Ever since we came we have seen the gaunt masts of one wreck spectrally haunting our feast from behind the lightship in the east. Now there is another on a sand-bank close to shore, a little to the north of the river's mouth.

It had been a glorious day, but towards evening the storm-clouds gathered and the wind rose in fitful gusts. A Baltic steamer, clearing out of the harbour at dusk, blocked up the mouth of the river for some hours owing to a fouled anchor, till at last, her cable being cut, she succeeded in getting to sea.

Meantime, a Yarmouth trawler, returning to port with a week's catch of fish, was misled by the lights of the disabled vessel, and, manoeuvring to get clear, backed on to the dangerous North Sand, whose floor is thickly strewed with remains of former wrecks.

From the pier, through the blackening night, we watched the crew's futile efforts to get off again. It was very like a fly's efforts to escape from a spider's web, and evidently as profitless. The more they struggled, the deeper in the sand they sank.

Now, boom! through the night came the bang of a great gun. The Admiralty men in charge of the Board of Trade life-saving apparatus were about to begin operations. We saw lights flickering to and fro on the Denes—the low bank of land between the river and the sea. Presently, with a prodigious whiz, up to the black sky and across the ship shot the rocket, bearing the lifeline that would bring the shipwrecked mariners to land! Before this, however, one of the five lifeboats maintained on this dangerous coast had been safely launched through the surf, and reached the wreck almost as soon as the line.

But neither line nor boat would the captain of the smack accept: to leave his ship meant loss of property, and property in England is of all things the most sacred.

The night by this time had become wild and fearful. The wind shrieked viciously; the waves broke ashore with a hungry roar; and from the swart clouds came down squalls of rain, merging land and lights and sea and sky in one blur of desolation.

There was no more to be seen. The crew of the stranded trawler deemed it safe to remain where they were. So we curious Cockneys, perceiving no hope of further fresh sensations, hastened us home to cosy beds and warmth.

I had just gone to sleep when a boom that shook the bed roused me with a start.

I jumped up and went to the window.

A signal-rocket had been fired from the coastguard station opposite our lodging.

THE LIFEBOAT.