eluge.

"About that time the Coastguardmen thought they saw the lights of a
steamer over the anchoring-ground. In a moment they vanished; but it is
clear that another vessel of some sort had tried for shelter in the
bay on that awful, blind night, had rammed the German ship amidships (a
breach--as one of the divers told me afterwards--'that you could sail
a Thames barge through'), and then had gone out either scathless or
damaged, who shall say; but had gone out, unknown, unseen, and fatal, to
perish mysteriously at sea. Of her nothing ever came to light, and yet
the hue and cry that was raised all over the world would have found her
out if she had been in existence anywhere on the face of the waters.

"A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy silence as of a neatly
executed crime, characterise this murderous disaster, which, as you may
remember, had its gruesome celebrity. The wind would have prevented the
loudest outcries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no
time for signals of distress. It was death without any sort of fuss. The
Hamburg ship, filling all at once, capsized as she sank, and at daylight
there was not even the end of a spar to be seen above water. She was
missed, of course, and at first the Coastguardmen surmised that she
had either dragged her anchor or parted her cable some time during the
night, and had been blown out to sea. Then, after the tide turned,
the wreck must have shifted a little and released some of the bodies,
because a child--a little fair-haired child in a red frock--came ashore
abreast of the Martello tower. By the afternoon you could see along
three miles of beach dark figures with bare legs dashing in and out
of the tumbling foam, and rough-looking men, women with hard faces,
children, mostly fair-haired, were being carried, stiff and dripping, on
stretchers, on wattles, on ladders, in a long procession past the door
of the 'Ship Inn,' to be laid out in a row under the north wall of the
Brenzett Church.

"Officially, the body of the little girl in the red frock is the first
thing that came ashore from that ship. But I have patients amongst the
seafaring population of West Colebrook, and, unofficially, I am informed
that very early that morning two brothers, who went down to look after
their cobble hauled up on the beach, found, a good way from Brenzett,
an ordinary ship's hencoop lying high and dry on the shore, with eleven
drowned ducks inside. Their families