"Alas! how terrible to see

                  "Alas! how terrible to see

                   The gallant bark sink rapidly."



    Fragments of the wreck and pieces of wood were washed ashore; they

were all that remained of the vessel. The wind still blew violently on

the coast.

    For a few moments the strange lady seemed to rest; but she awoke

in pain, and uttered cries of anguish and fear. She opened her

wonderfully beautiful eyes, and spoke a few words, but nobody

understood her.- And lo! as a reward for the sorrow and suffering

she had undergone, she held in her arms a new-born babe. The child

that was to have rested upon a magnificent couch, draped with silken

curtains, in a luxurious home; it was to have been welcomed with joy

to a life rich in all the good things of this world; and now Heaven

had ordained that it should be born in this humble retreat, that it

should not even receive a kiss from its mother, for when the

fisherman's wife laid the child upon the mother's bosom, it rested

on a heart that beat no more- she was dead.

    The child that was to have been reared amid wealth and luxury

was cast into the world, washed by the sea among the sand-hills to

share the fate and hardships of the poor.

    Here we are reminded again of the song about "The King of

England's Son," for in it mention is made of the custom prevalent at

the time, when knights and squires plundered those who had been

saved from shipwreck. The ship had stranded some distance south of

Nissum Bay, and the cruel, inhuman days, when, as we have just said,

the inhabitants of Jutland treated the shipwrecked people so crudely

were past, long ago. Affectionate sympathy and self-sacrifice for

the unfortunate existed then, just as it does in our own time in

many a bright example. The dying mother and the unfortunate child

would have found kindness and help wherever they had been cast by

the winds, but nowhere would it have been more sincere than in the

cottage of the poor fisherman's wife, who had stood, only the day

before, beside her child's grave, who would have been five years old

that day if God had spared it to her.

    No one knew who the dead stranger was, they could not even form

a conjecture; the fragments of wreckage gave no clue to the matter.

    No tidings reached Spain of the fate of the daughter and

son-in-law. They did not arrive at their destination, and violent

storms had raged during the past weeks. At last the verdict was given:

"Foundered at sea- all lost." But in the fisherman's cottage among the

sand-hills near Hunsby, there lived a little scion of the rich Spanish

family.

    Where Heaven sends food for two, a third can manage to find a

meal, and in the depth of the sea there is many a dish of fish for the

hungry.