ney every year. Our undying and unconquerable enemy is the storm, and
our great engines of war with which, through the blessing of God, we are
enabled to fight more or less successfully against the foe, are the
Lifeboat and the Rocket.

These engines, and the brave men who work them, are our sentinels of the
coast. When the storm is brewing; when grey clouds lower, and muttering
thunder comes rolling over the sea, men with hard hands and bronzed
faces, clad in oilskin coats and sou'westers, saunter down to our quays
and headlands, all round the kingdom. These are the Lifeboat crews on
the look-out. The enemy is moving, and the sentinels are being posted--
or, rather, they are posting themselves--for the night, for all the
fighting men in this great war are volunteers. They need no drilling to
prepare them for the field; no bugle or drum to sound the charge. Their
drum is the rattling thunder, their trumpet the roaring storm. They
began to train for this warfare when they were not so tall as their
fathers' boots, and there are no awkward squads among them now. Their
organisation is rough and ready, like themselves, and simple too. The
heavens call them to action; the coxswain grasps the helm; the men seize
the oars; the word is given, and the rest is straightforward fighting--
over everything, through everything, in the teeth of everything, until
the victory is gained, and rescued men and women and children are landed
in safety on our shores.

In the winter of 1863 my enthusiasm in the Lifeboat cause was aroused by
the reading in the papers of that wonderful achievement of the famous
Ramsgate Lifeboat, which, on a terrible night in that year, fought
against the storm for sixteen hours, and rescued a hundred and twenty
souls from death.

A strange fatality attaches to me somehow--namely, that whenever I have
an attack of enthusiasm, a book is the result!

Immediately after reading this episode in the great war, I called on the
Secretary of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, who kindly gave me
minute information as to the working of his Society, and lent me its
journals.

Then I took train to the coast of Deal, and spent a considerable part of
the succeeding weeks in the company of Isaac Jarman--at that time the
coxswain of the Ramsgate Lifeboat, and the chief hero in many a gallant
fight with the sea.

The splendid craft which he commanded was one of the self-righting,
insubmergible boats of the Inst