Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/243

Rh, and covered with a coating of green broom; that garden, now desolate, filled with herbs in their season, and with flowers, hemmed round with a fence of cherry and plum-trees; and the whole possessed by a young fisherman, who won a fair subsistence for his wife and children from the waters of the Solway sea; you may imagine it, too, as far from the present time as fifty years. There are only two persons living now who remember when the Bonne-Homme-Richard, the first ship ever Richard Faulder commanded, was wrecked on the Pellock sand; one of these persons now addresses you, the other is the fisherman who once owned that cottage—whose name ought never to be named, and whose life seems lengthened as a warning to the earth how fierce God's judgments are. Life changes—all breathing things have their time and their season; but the Solway flows in the same beauty—Criffel rises in the same majesty—the light of morning comes and the full moon arises now as they did then. But this moralizing matters little. It was about the middle of harvest—I remember the day well; it had been sultry and suffocating, accompanied by rushings of wind, sudden convulsions of the water, and cloudings of the sun—I heard my father sigh, and say, 'Dool—dool to them found on the deep sea to-night; there will happen strong storm and fearful tempest.' The day closed and the moon came over Skiddaw: all was perfectly clear and still—frequent dashings and whirling agitations of the sea were soon heard mingling with the hasty clang of the water-fowls' wings as they forsook the waves and sought shelter among the hollows of the rocks. The storm was nigh. The sky darkened down at once—clap after clap of thunder followed, and lightning flashed so vividly and so frequent that the wide and agitated expanse of Solway was visible from side to side—from St. Bees to Barnhourie. A very heavy rain, mingled with hail, succeeded; and a wind accompanied it so fierce and so high that the white foam of the sea was showered as thick as snow on the summit of Caerlaverock Castle.

"Through this perilous sea, and amid this darkness and tempest, a bark was observed coming swiftly down the middle of the sea, her sails rent and her decks crowded with people. The carry, as it is called, of the tempest, was direct from St. Bees to Caerlaverock; and experienced swains could see that the bark would be driven full on the