HALF-A-MILE from the village, close to the verge of a cliff more remarkable for its fossiliferous deposits than for height, a little wooden hut, built of wreck- timber and roofed with red tiles, stands exposed to the full fury of every storm which blows, according to the marine vernacular, "from the nor'rard." To all appearance the hut, or, as the mem- bers of the beach company whose head- quarters it is call it, the " shod," might date from the days when Defoe visited this part of the coast and remarked that all its barns, stables, and hog-styes * Prom The Globe.

were built of the "ruins of mariners and merchants' fortunes" ; but "Uncle" Jethroe, who boasts the distinction of being the oldest member of the com- pany, confidently asserts that its frame- work "was erected the year after Nelson won the Battle of the Nile, and that his (Jethro's) father cut the corner-posts out of the wreck of the Norwegian barque Odin, which drove ashore during the previous winter. So it may be safely assumed—for a beach company's traditions with regard to wrecks are as trustworthy as an almanac—that some parts of the existing " shod " date from the early years of the nineteenth cen-tury. As a wooden building, therefore, it has some claim to be considered venerable. More than any house in the village it has associations calculated to stir the heart and excite painful feelings. From the shelter of its low, storm-battered roof men have hastened to meet death and do daring deeds.

Undaunted by the fact that their fathers' bones lay deep beneath the sea which roared its dread challenge to them, they went out unhesitatingly to meet their fathers' fate or gain another victory over their familiar friend and ancient enemy.

When the Norwegian winds, as the beachmen call the north-easters, are blowing, and the treacherous shoals off the coast are showing their " hungry white teeth," an interesting group often assembles around the fire which " Uncle" Jethro keeps burning in the hut. For the most part it consists of the men who, whenever there is a call for their services, man the Life-boat which is launched near a neighbouring cleft in the cliffs. Some of them are hardy old seamen who have laid their hands " upon the ocean's mane and played familiar with its hoary locks " ; others are long- shore men who snatch a precarious liveli- hood from the sea by draw-netting and shrimping; but a few are men usually content to labour on the land and yet are always ready to make up the com- plement of the Life-boat's crew. All of them, seamen and landsmen, seem to have inherited, in a greater or less degree, the sea-going instinct, which may have come to them from a Norse ancestry, for before the Norman conquest the Scandinavian raiders of East Anglian shores established many settlements on this part of the coast, and the hamlets still perpetuate the names of long-forgotten vikings. Occa- sional mutual defiance of stormy winds and seas has here cemented an under- standing between seamen and some who nearly the whole year through are landsmen. A century or so -ago a similar league existed to baffle the local excisemen. Around the fire tales are still told of the days when the beachmen would launch their boats and put off to some French lugger which had crept inshore under cover of night, while certain farmhands, living in isolated cottages near the coast, in response to strange signals flashed from seaward, would steal down to the shore and convey mysterious bales and kegs to some cache in the midst of the marsh- lands. Probably, if the truth were mown, it would reveal that the beach company, though now an institution devoted to life-saving and cargo-salvage, was originally a smuggling gang, and it is doubtful if there be a man among its members who would consider this surmise a reflection on its integrity.

If there be any dark pages in its history —and deeds that were not all romantic occurred in the old free-trading days— they are so written over with the records of brave deeds that no man now need blush to show them.

If anyone imagines that Crabbe's description of the beachman as— a wild amphibious race, With sullen woe disglay'd in every face; Who, far from civil arts and social fly, And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye, still applies to the men of our East Anglian seaboard hamlets he has only to join the company assembled in the hut on a winter's night to be undeceived.

When the men are yarning, he will hear such outbursts of merriment as may cause him to wonder that explosions of mirth have not accomplished what the storms have been unable to do— that is, demolish the hut long ago.

Instead of being greeted with scowls and glances of suspicion, he will see a place vacated for him at the fireside end of one of the wooden benches; and if his sociability equals that of those whose companionship" he has sought, it will soon win him an attentive and responsive audience. Instead of an "artful, surly, savage race," he will discover men whose heroic conduct would, had it been witnessed by the world's eye, have won them lasting fame—men who are accustomed to reckon risk of life" all in a day's work." Some of them, it is true, will not impress him as looking like heroes. For instance, no one would imagine that the short, rubicund, grizzly-haired 'longshore man, who is always smoking a black clay pipe or humming that familiar East Coast sea-song, the "Princess Royal,"once, when the rocket-line failed to reach a stranded schooner, plunged into the surf 'with a rope made fast to his waist, and, after being twice swept back breathless to the beach, succeeded in carrying the line to the breaking vessel.

Nor is there in the appearance of Old Ned, the Life-boat coxswain, anything to suggest that his services have been such as to gain him a medal with two clasps from the Life-boat Institution, a pair of binoculars from the Board of Trade, and an expression of thanks and admiration written in a language which, to the old man, is as cryptic as uncial Greek, endorsed with the signature of one of Europe's greatest Monarchs.

Such gatherings as take place in the hut, when the voice of the wind takes that deep note which is a cry of warning to the seamen, are familiar to many dwellers on the East Anglian coast, and it is to them that hundreds of sailors owe their lives. For, no matter how interesting may be the yarning or contagious the merriment, watchful eyes are always on the look-out for the nickering of the ruddy flare, or the soaring of the rocket, and ears alert for the booming of the lightship gun. A flash from far over the troubled waters is enough to empty the hut in an instant of all but the decrepit veterans, and before the latter have decided whether the flash came from seaward or off the shoals, the Life-boat crew are tackling on to the hauling-off rope, and the men on the tossing lightship know that their signal is being answered.

And once again there is a fight between a few strong - hearted men and the mightiest forces of nature, a battle fought which, whether lost or won, will attract less notice than the announce- ment of a race result, but which, when the final accounts of men's lives are audited, should show something to the sea-warriors' credit in the Book of God.