y night in 1732, when a terrific blast of wind tore the
roof off the church. The shock, we are told, brought on a paralytic
seizure of which he died.

By the churchyard gate stands the old market-cross, recently set up in
this new position and supplied with a modern head.

As we go towards Spurn Head we are more and more impressed with the
desolate character of the shore. The tide may be out, and only puny
waves tumbling on the wet sand, and yet it is impossible to refrain
from feeling that the very peacefulness of the scene is sinister, and
the waters are merely digesting their last meal of boulder-clay before
satisfying a fresh appetite.

The busy town of Hornsea Beck, the port of Hornsea, with its harbour
and pier, its houses, and all pertaining to it, has entirely
disappeared since the time of James I., and so also has the place
called Hornsea Burton, where in 1334 Meaux Abbey held twenty-seven
acres of arable land. At the end of that century not one of those acres
remained. The fate of Owthorne, a village once existing not far from
Withernsea, is pathetic. The churchyard was steadily destroyed, until
1816, when in a great storm the waves undermined the foundations of the
eastern end of the church, so that the walls collapsed with a roar and
a cloud of dust.

Twenty-two years later there was scarcely a fragment of even the
churchyard left, and in 1844, the Vicarage and the remaining houses
were absorbed, and Owthorne was wiped off the map.

The peninsula formed by the Humber is becoming more and more
attenuated, and the pretty village of Easington is being brought nearer
to the sea, winter by winter. Close to the church, Easington has been
fortunate in preserving its fourteenth-century tithe-barn covered with
a thatched roof. The interior has that wonderfully imposing effect
given by huge posts and beams suggesting a wooden cathedral.

At Kilnsea the weak bank of earth forming the only resistance to the
waves has been repeatedly swept away and hundreds of acres flooded with
salt water, and where there are any cliffs at all, they are often not
more than fifteen feet high.

CHAPTER XXI

BEVERLEY

When the great bell in the southern tower of the Minster booms forth
its deep and solemn notes over the city of Beverley, you experience an
uplifting of the mind--a sense of exaltation greater, perhaps, than
even that produced by an organ's vibrating notes in the high vaulted
spaces of a cathedral.

Beve