If a vessel drove
ashore on their coast, that surely was the act and the will of God, and
it was not for them to question His decrees or to thwart His intentions.
Many, since the days of the wreckers, have been the ships cast away
along that rugged coast-line which starts southward from the grim
promontory of St. Abb's Head, and runs, cruelly rock-girt or stretched
in open bay of yellow sand, away past Berwick and down by Holy Island.
Many have been the disasters, pitiful on occasion the loss of life. But
never, since history began, has disaster come upon the coast like to
that which befell the little town of Eyemouth in the early autumn of
1881, never has loss of life so heartrending overwhelmed a small
community. Once the headquarters of smuggling on our eastern coast, and
built--as it is well known was also built a certain street of small
houses in Spittal--with countless facilities for promoting the
operations of "Free Trade," and with "bolt-holes" innumerable for the
smugglers when close pressed by gangers, Eyemouth is still a quaint
little town, huddling its strangely squeezed-up houses in narrow lanes
and wynds betwixt river and bay. There, too, as at a northern town
better known to fame than Eyemouth,
"The grey North Ocean girds it round,
And o'er the rocks, and up the bay,
The long sea-rollers surge and sound,
And still the thin and biting spray
Drives down the melancholy street.
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