ture of this dangerous task who has not run
before a gale off shore for five or six miles to leeward, and then
tried to get back home dead to windwards. No one who has ever tried
it, and got back, will ever forget it, if his voyage, or rather his
escape from death, has been effected in an open boat.

Nor can any one realize how furious and terrible is the aspect of the
sea in a gale off shore, and especially in the surf of the Goodwins,
who has not been personally through such an experience.

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution pay the men who form the
lifeboat crew on each occasion generously and to the utmost limit their
funds will admit. No one who knows the facts of the case and the
management of this splendid Institution can have any doubt on this
subject. Each man is paid L1 for a night service, and 10_s_. for
service in the daytime. If he be engaged night and day, he is paid
30_s_. This single launch cost L18--that is, L15 to the fifteen men
who formed the crew, and L3 to the forty helpers who were engaged in
launching and heaving up the lifeboat on her return.

But no money payment could compensate the men for the risk to their
lives--lives precious to women and children at home; and no money
payment could supply the impulse which fired these men and supported
them in their work of rescue.

One of the men in the lifeboat on this occasion, Henry Marsh, and his
name will end this chapter, was the man referred to in Chapter II, who
had on the day he was going to be married, many years before, rushed
into a lugger bound to the rescue of a ship's crew on the Goodwins.

Notwithstanding the splendid services of the Deal lifeboatmen in many a
heart-stirring rescue, they seem utterly unconscious of having done
anything heroic. This is a remarkable and most interesting feature in
their character. There is no boasting, no self-consciousness, and not
the faintest word of self-praise ever crosses their lips. The noblest,
the purest motives and impulses that can actuate man glow within their
breasts, as they risk their lives for others, and they nevertheless are
dumb respecting their deeds. They die, they dare, and they suffer in
silence.

A lifeboat rescue killed poor Robert Wilds, the coxswain of the Deal
lifeboat. The present second coxswain of the same lifeboat, E. Hanger,
was struck down after a rescue by pneumonia. J. Mackins, the coxswain
of the Walmer lifeboat, was also seized by pneumonia after a