aid.

They laid her upon the humble bed; there was not a yard of linen
on it, only a woollen coverlet to keep the occupant warm.

Life returned to her, but she was delirious, and knew nothing of
what had happened or where she was; and it was better so, for
everything she loved and valued lay buried in the sea. The same
thing happened to her ship as to the one spoken of in the song about
"The King of England's Son."

"Alas! how terrible to see
The gallant bark sink rapidly."

Fragments of the wreck and pieces of wood were washed ashore; they
were all that remained of the vessel. The wind still blew violently on
the coast.

For a few moments the strange lady seemed to rest; but she awoke
in pain, and uttered cries of anguish and fear. She opened her
wonderfully beautiful eyes, and spoke a few words, but nobody
understood her.--And lo! as a reward for the sorrow and suffering
she had undergone, she held in her arms a new-born babe. The child
that was to have rested upon a magnificent couch, draped with silken
curtains, in a luxurious home; it was to have been welcomed with joy
to a life rich in all the good things of this world; and now Heaven
had ordained that it should be born in this humble retreat, that it
should not even receive a kiss from its mother, for when the
fisherman's wife laid the child upon the mother's bosom, it rested
on a heart that beat no more--she was dead.

The child that was to have been reared amid wealth and luxury
was cast into the world, washed by the sea among the sand-hills to
share the fate and hardships of the poor.

Here we are reminded again of the song about "The King of
England's Son," for in it mention is made of the custom prevalent at
the time, when knights and squires plundered those who had been
saved from shipwreck. The ship had stranded some distance south of
Nissum Bay, and the cruel, inhuman days, when, as we have just said,
the inhabitants of Jutland treated the shipwrecked people so crudely
were past, long ago. Affectionate sympathy and self-sacrifice for
the unfortunate existed then, just as it does in our own time in
many a bright example. The dying mother and the unfortunate child
would have found kindness and help wherever they had been cast by
the winds, but nowhere would it have been more sincere than in the
cottage of the poor fisherman's wife, who had stood, only the day
before, beside her child's grave, who would have been five years old
that day if G