r ever lost amid its wilds.

My old friend Peggotty tells me, in a quiet, matter-of-fact manner,
a story much more weird than this. He says that after we watchers
had left the scene, the divers got fairly to work and attained a
fair run of the ship. They found she lay broadside on to a bank of
sand, by the edge of which she had sunk till it overtopped her
decks. By the action of the tide the sand had drifted over the ship,
and had even at that early date commenced to bury her. The bodies
of the passengers were there by the hundred, all huddled together
on the lee-side.

"The divers could not see them," Peggotty adds, "for what with the
mud and sand the water is pretty thick down there. But they could
feel them well enough--an arm sticking out there, and a knee sticking
out here, and sometimes half a body clear of the silt, owing to lying
one over another. They could have got them all up easy enough, and
would, too, if they had been paid for it. They were told that they
were to have a pound apiece for all they brought up. They sent up
one, but there was no money for it, and no one particularly glad to
see it, and so they left them all there, snug enough as far as
burying goes. The diving turned out a poor affair altogether. The
cargo wasn't much good for bringing up, bein' chiefly railway iron,
spades, and such like. There were one or two sales at Dover of odd
stores they brought up, but it didn't fetch in much altogether, and
they soon gave up the job as a bad un."

The years have brought little change to this strange out-of-the-way
corner of the world, an additional wreck or two being scarcely a
noteworthy incident. The section of an old boat in which, with
fortuitous bits of building tacked on at odd times as necessity has
arisen, the Peggottys live is as brightly tarred as ever, and still
stoutly braves the gales in which many a fine ship has foundered
just outside the front door. One peculiarity of the otherwise
desirable residence is that, with the wind blowing either from the
eastward, westward, or southward, Mrs. Peggotty will never allow
the front door to be opened. As these quarters of the wind
comprehend a considerable stretch of possible weather, the
consequence is that the visitor approaching the house in the usual
manner is on eight days out of ten disturbed by the apparition of
Peggotty at the little look-out window, violently, and to the
stranger, mysteriously, beckoning him away to the northward,
ap