and in the west a streak of unnatural-looking green light was all
that stood for the splendours of sunset.

'She do be a rum 'un,' said young Benenden, who had strolled along the
beach with the glasses the gentleman gave him for saving the little boy
from drowning. 'Don't know as I ever see another just like her.'

'I'd give half a dollar to any chap as can tell me where she hails
from--and what port it is where they has ships o' that cut,' said
middle-aged Haversham to the group that had now gathered.

'George!' exclaimed young Benenden from under his field-glasses, 'she's
going.' And she went. Her bow went down suddenly and she stood stern up
in the water--like a duck after rain. Then quite slowly, with no
unseemly hurry, but with no moment's change of what seemed to be her
fixed purpose, the ship sank and the grey rolling waves wiped out the
place where she had been.

Now I hope you will not expect me to tell you anything more about this
ship--because there is nothing more to tell. What country she came from,
what port she was bound for, what cargo she carried, and what kind of
tongue her crew spoke--all these things are dead secrets. And a dead
secret is a secret that nobody knows. No other secrets are dead secrets.
Even I do not know this one, or I would tell you at once. For I, at
least, have no secrets from you.

[Illustration: Her bow went down suddenly.]

When ships go down off Dungeness, things from them have a way of being
washed up on the sands of that bay which curves from Dungeness to
Folkestone, where the sea has bitten a piece out of the land--just such
a half-moon-shaped piece as you bite out of a slice of bread-and-butter.
Bits of wood tangled with ropes--broken furniture--ships' biscuits in
barrels and kegs that have held brandy--seamen's chests--and sometimes
sadder things that we will not talk about just now.

Now, if you live by the sea and are grown-up you know that if you find
anything on the seashore (I don't mean starfish or razor-shells or
jellyfish and sea-mice, but anything out of a ship that you would really
like to keep) your duty is to take it up to the coast-guard and say,
'Please, I've found this.' Then the coast-guard will send it to the
proper authority, and one of these days you'll get a reward of one-third
of the value of whatever it was that you picked up. But two-thirds of
the value of anything, or even three-thirds of its value, is not at all
the same thing as the thing i