eous conduct in rowing a small boat into the surf at
the risk of her life, and rescuing two little boys who had fallen into
the sea from the outer pier at Lyme Regis, Dorset, on the 4th August."

Again, in October, 1879, the Committee of the National Lifeboat
Institution voted the Silver Medal of the Institution, and a copy of the
vote inscribed on vellum, to Miss Ellen Francis Prideaux Brune, Miss
Gertrude Rose Prideaux Brune, Miss Mary Katherine Prideaux Brune, Miss
Beatrice May Prideaux Brune, and Miss Nora O'Shaughnessy, in
acknowledgment of their intrepid and prompt services in proceeding
through a heavy surf in their rowing-boat, and saving, at considerable
risk of life, a sailor from a boat which had been capsized by a squall
of wind off Bray Hill, Padstow Harbour, Cornwall, on the 9th August.
When the accident occurred, the ladies' boat was being towed astern of a
fishing-boat, and Miss Ellen Prideaux Brune, with great gallantry and
determination, asked to be cast off, and, with her companions, she
proceeded with all possible despatch to the rescue of the drowning
sailor. All the ladies showed great courage, presence of mind, and
marked ability in the management of their small boat. They ran great
risk in getting the man into it, on account of the strong tide and sea
on at the time.

So it would appear that the spirit of the far-famed Grace Darling has
not yet departed from the land!

If heroism consists in boldly facing and successfully overcoming dangers
of the most appalling nature, then I hold that thousands of our men of
the coast--from Shetland to the Land's End--stand as high as do those
among our soldiers and sailors who wear the Victoria Cross. Let us
consider an example.

On that night in which the Royal Charter went down, there was a Maltese
sailor on board named Joseph Rodgers, who volunteered to swim ashore
with a rope. Those who have seen the effect of a raging sea even on a
smooth beach, know that the power of the falling waves is terrible, and
their retreating force so great that the most powerful swimmers
occasionally perish in them. But the coast to which Rodgers volunteered
to swim was an almost perpendicular cliff.

I write as an eye-witness, reader, for I saw the cliff myself, a few
days after the wreck took place, when I went down to that dreary coast
of Anglesea to identify the bodies of lost kindred. Ay, and at that
time I also saw something of the awful aspect of loss by shipw