dled him headlong into the wood-lodge, and in-
stantly shot the bolt. Thereupon he wiped his

brow, though the day was cold. He had done his
duty to the community by shutting up a wander-

ing and probably dangerous maniac. Smith isn't
a hard man at all, but he had room in his brain only

for that one idea of lunacy. He was not imagina-
tive enough to ask himself whether the man might

not be perishing with cold and hunger. Meantime,
at first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in

the lodge. Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs,
where she had locked herself in her bedroom; but

Amy Foster sobbed piteously at the kitchen door,
wringing her hands and muttering, 'Don't!

don't!' I daresay Smith had a rough time of it
that evening with one noise and another, and this

insane, disturbing voice crying obstinately through
the door only added to his irritation. He couldn't

possibly have connected this troublesome lunatic
with the sinking of a ship in Eastbay, of which

there had been a rumour in the Darnford market-
place. And I daresay the man inside had been very

near to insanity on that night. Before his excite-
ment collapsed and he became unconscious he was

throwing himself violently about in the dark, roll-
ing on some dirty sacks, and biting his fists with

rage, cold, hunger, amazement, and despair.
"He was a mountaineer of the eastern range of

the Carpathians, and the vessel sunk the night be-
fore in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship

Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea, of appalling mem-
ory.

"A few months later we could read in the papers
the accounts of the bogus 'Emigration Agencies'

among the Sclavonian peasantry in the more re-
mote provinces of Austria. The object of these

scoundrels was to get hold of the poor ignorant
people's homesteads, and they were in league with

the local usurers. They exported their victims
through Hamburg mostly. As to the ship, I had

watched her out of this very window, reaching
close-hauled under short canvas into the bay on a

dark, threatening afternoon. She came to an an-
chor, correctly by the chart, off the Brenzett Coast-

guard station. I remember before the night fell
looking out again at the outlines of her spars and

rigging that stood out dark and pointed on a back-
ground of ragged, slaty clouds like another and a

slighter spire to the left of the Brenzett church-
tower. In the evening the wind rose. At midnight

I could hear in my bed the terrific gusts and the
sounds of a driving deluge.

"About that time the Coastguardmen thought
they saw the lights of a steamer over the anchoring-

ground. In a moment they vanished; but it is clear
that another vessel of some sort had tried for shel-

ter in the bay on that awful, blind night, had
rammed the German ship amidships (a breach--

as one of the divers told me afterwards--'that you
could sail a Thames barge through'), and then

had gone out either scathless or damaged, who shall
say; but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal,

to perishmysteriously at sea. Of her nothing ever
came to light, and yet the hue and cry that was

raised all over the world would have found her out
if she had been in existenceanywhere on the face

of the waters.
"A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy

silence as of a neatly executed crime, characterise
this murderousdisaster, which, as you may remem-

ber, had its gruesome celebrity. The wind would
have prevented the loudest outcries from reaching

the shore; there had been evidently no time for sig-
nals of distress. It was death without any sort of

fuss. The Hamburg ship, filling all at once, cap-
sized as she sank, and at daylight there was not

even the end of a spar to be seen above water. She
was missed, of course, and at first the Coastguard-

men surmised that she had either dragged her an-
chor or parted her cable some time during the

night, and had been blown out to sea. Then, after
the tide turned, the wreck must have shifted a little

and released some of the bodies, because a child
--a little fair-haired child in a red frock--

came ashoreabreast of the Martello tower. By
the afternoon you could see along three miles of

beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in
and out of the tumbling foam, and rough-look-

ing men, women with hard faces, children, mostly
fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and dripping,

on stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long
procession past the door of the 'Ship Inn,' to be

laid out in a row under the north wall of the
Brenzett Church.

"Officially, the body of the little girl in the red
frock is the first thing that came ashore from that

ship. But I have patients amongst the seafaring
population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially, I

am informed that very early that morning two
brothers, who went down to look after their cobble

hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from
Brenzett, an ordinary ship's hencoop lying high

and dry on the shore, with eleven drowned ducks
inside. Their families ate the birds, and the hen-

coop was split into firewood with a hatchet. It is
possible that a man (supposing he happened to be

on deck at the time of the accident) might have
floated ashore on that hencoop. He might. I ad-

mit it is improbable, but there was the man--and
for days, nay, for weeks--it didn't enter our heads

that we had amongst us the only living soul that
had escaped from that disaster. The man himself,

even when he learned to speak intelligibly, could
tell us very little. He remembered he had felt bet-

ter (after the ship had anchored, I suppose), and
that the darkness, the wind, and the rain took his

breath away. This looks as if he had been on deck
some time during that night. But we mustn't forget

he had been taken out of his knowledge, that he
had been sea-sick and battened down below for four

days, that he had no general notion of a ship or of
the sea, and therefore could have no definite idea

of what was happening to him. The rain, the
wind, the darkness he knew; he understood the

bleating of the sheep, and he remembered the pain
of his wretchedness and misery, his heartbroken as-

tonishment that it was neither seen nor understood,
his dismay at finding all the men angry and all the