fire burning, and in which the
sailors and boatmen of the place always congregated when they had
nothing else to do.

We struck up acquaintance with one or two of these rough tars, who,
seeing perhaps that we were in rather a dismal way, or else glad of
anything in the way of a variety, used to invite us up to warm ourselves
at the fire. We very soon got to feel at home in the "look-out," and
found plenty of entertainment in the yarns and songs with which the men
whiled away the time.

A great deal of what we heard, now I remember it, was not very
improving; the songs, many of them, were coarse, and as for the yarns,
though we swallowed them all at the time, I fancy they were spun mostly
out of the fancy of the narrators. Wonderful stories they were, of
shipwreck, and battle, and peril, over which we got so excited that we
lay awake at night and shuddered, or else dreamed about them, which was
even worse.

One man, I remember, told us how he fought with a shark under water in
the South Seas, and stabbed it with the knife in his right hand, just as
the monster's teeth were closing on his other arm. And to make his
story more vivid he bared his great shaggy arm, and showed us an ugly
white scar among the tattoo marks above the elbow. Another man told us
how he had stood beside Nelson on the "Victory," just as the admiral
received his death-wound; and it never occurred to us to wonder how a
man of not more than thirty-five could have been present at that famous
battle, which took place fifty years ago! But the yarn that pleased us
most was the one about the wreck of the "Wolf King," when the Kingstairs
lifeboat, the "Dreadnought," put out in a tremendous gale, and reached
her just as she was going down, and rescued sixteen of her crew. This
story we called for over and over again, till we knew it by heart. And
many a time, as we lay awake at night, and heard the wind whistling
round the house, we wondered if it was a storm like this when the "Wolf
King" went down, or whether any ship would be getting on to the Sands
to-night.

It was Christmas Eve--a wild, blustering night. It had been blowing up
hard for several days now, and we were used to the howling of the wind
and the roar of the waves on the beach. We had gone to bed tired and
excited, for the promised hamper had arrived that afternoon, and we had
been unpacking it. What a wonderful hamper it was! A turkey to begin
with, and a _Swiss Family Robinson_