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Then as to the saving of life–in those days, and well on into the eighteenth century, it was believed to be a most unlucky thing to save a drowning person; he was sure eventually to do his rescuer some deadly injury. A similar belief, as regards the ill luck, prevails in China to this day; nothing will induce a Chinaman to help a drowning man from the water. In our own case, probably this superstition as to ill luck originated in the obvious fact that if there were no survivor from a wreck, there could be no one to interfere with the claim made by the finders to what they considered their lawful due. If a vessel drove ashore on their coast, that surely was the act and the will of God, and it was not for them to question His decrees or to thwart His intentions.

Many, since the days of the wreckers, have been the ships cast away along that rugged coast-line which starts southward from the grim promontory of St. Abb’s Head, and runs, cruelly rock-girt or stretched in open bay of yellow sand, away past Berwick and down by Holy Island. Many have been the disasters, pitiful on occasion the loss of life. But never, since history began, has disaster come upon the coast like to that which befell the little town of Eyemouth in the early autumn of 1881, never has loss of life so heartrending overwhelmed a small community. Once the headquarters of smuggling on our eastern coast, and built–as it is well known was also built a certain street of small houses in Spittal–with countless facilities for promoting the operations of “Free Trade,” and with “bolt-holes” innumerable for the smugglers when close pressed by gangers, Eyemouth is still a quaint little town, huddling its strangely squeezed-up houses in narrow lanes and wynds betwixt river and bay. There, too, as at a northern town better known to fame than Eyemouth,

“The grey North Ocean girds it round,
And o’er the rocks, and up the bay,
The long sea-rollers surge and sound,
And still the thin and biting spray
Drives down the melancholy street.”

* * * * *

Truly, in Eyemouth it is not alone spray that drives. So close a neighbour is the protecting sea-wall to some of the houses that turn weather-beaten backs on the bay, that at high tide during a north-easterly gale the giant seas, breaking against the wall, burst also clear over the houses, hurling themselves in torrents of icy water into the street beyond. And up the width of one little street that runs to the bay, and past its barricaded doors, you may see sometimes billows that have overleapt the wall come charging, to ebb with angry swish and long-drawn clatter of shingle as the waves suck back. It is a strange sight, and it causes one to wonder what manner of men they are who dwell here, who draw their living from the bosom of a sea that thus harshly treats its children. Yet it is a sea that can be kindly enough; and in the long, golden summer evenings, when the brown-sailed fishing-boats in endless procession draw out from the “haven under the hill,” to vanish seaward in the deepening twilight, you would scarce believe that a thing so gentle could be guilty of treachery, or ever could arise in sudden mad frenzy to slay those who had trusted it.

Yet that was what happened that terrible Friday, the 14th of October 1881. No summer’s morning could have dawned more peaceful and fair. And here we were but in mid-October, when the woods are in their glory and Scotland looks still for the settled weather of her “Indian summer”; there should yet be ample measure of quiet days and nights ere winter gales rumble in the chimneys and wail through the rigging of boats lying weather-bound in harbour.