llowing are the newspaper accounts of a lifeboat service that
will always be memorable in the annals of the services of the lifeboats
of the National Lifeboat Institution; and many and many such services
reflect honour alike on the humanity of the age in which we live, and
on the organisation and liberality which have prompted and called them
into existence.

'On the afternoon of Thursday, January 6, I made one of a great crowd
assembled on the Ramsgate east pier to witness the arrival of the
survivors of the crew of a large ship which had gone ashore on the Long
Sand early on the preceding Wednesday morning. A heavy gale had been
blowing for two days from the north and east; it had moderated somewhat
at noon, but still stormed fiercely over the surging waters, though a
brilliant blue sky arched overhead and a sun shone that made the sea a
dazzling surface of broken silver all away in the south and west.
Plunging bows under as she came along, the steamer towed the lifeboat
through a haze of spray; but amid this veil of foam, the flags of the
two vessels denoting that shipwrecked men were in the boat streamed
like well-understood words from the mastheads. The people crowded
thickly about the landing-steps when the lifeboat entered the harbour.
Whispers flew from mouth to mouth. Some said the rescued men were
Frenchmen, others that they were Danes, but all were agreed that there
was a dead body among them. One by one the survivors came along the
pier, the most dismal procession it was ever my lot to behold--eleven
live but scarcely living men, most of them clad in oilskins, and
walking with bowed backs, drooping heads and nerveless arms. There was
blood on the faces of some, circled with a white encrustation of salt,
and this same salt filled the hollows of their eyes and streaked their
hair with lines which looked like snow. The first man, who was the
chief mate, walked leaning heavily on the arm of the kindly-hearted
harbour-master, Captain Braine. The second man, whose collar-bone was
broken, moved as one might suppose a galvanised corpse would. A third
man's wan face wore a forced smile, which only seemed to light up the
piteous, underlying expression of the features. They were all
saturated with brine; they were soaked with sea-water to the very
marrow of the bones. Shivering, and with a stupefied rolling of the
eyes, their teeth clenched, their chilled fingers pressed into the
palms of their hands, they pa