Sea-Washed Churches.

Evening Post, Volume LXXII, Issue 66, 15 September 1906, Page 10

Sea-Washed Churches.

In parts of tho coast where the shore has suffered from erosion, where the waves have dragged down the land in greedy mouthfuls oV sucked it slowly and persistently, there are churches or portions of churches surviving in pathetic memorial of what the sea has done. It may be that these were not always seaside churches at all; they may have stood inland among smiling meadows that have now vanished — perhaps they were a mile or more from the rolling of the waves, beyond the reach of its voice except when tempests made it thunderous. They may have been a centre of peaceful village life ; the ringers have come hither tp chime for service, to Deal for weddings, to toll for burials. Aged persons dreamed without foreboding of lying in the churchyard whose trees and grasses rustled to the mepting of sweet country airs and keen sea breezes. But in the distance the sea was doing its work surely. Weeks and months 'of the ebb and flow had their quiet result ; days and nights of tempest washed away yard alter yard, or it might be many yards together, of the land that had been gradually undermined. Field after field was invaded and nibbled at, and swallowed, their possessors suffering grievous loss by "act of God" against which there was no appeal. At last — it may be many centuries after the church was erected — its graveyard -lay upon the very edge ; consecrated ground had no more power to resist the disregarding waters than had the fields of daisies and hedgerows. There came a night of storm, when the very graveyard was desecrated ; human dust and bones were scattered scornfully by hissing waves — the place of sleep became a place of tumult and lashing waters; headstone and crumbling coffin became the playthings of foaming breakers. This was very different from -the peace that had' freen prayed for by the sleepers and the iriends of those who slept; this was a requiem very different from the priests' liturgic dirge, or the sign of spring breezes that scattered flowers. It was not the brushing of the lark against the long grasses, nor the feet of village children playing above the mounds. In old days travellers along this northeastern coast have come across bones among the sand, and for a moment, have wondered what animal it was whose remains had .Thus been uncovered by tho waves ; then it suddenly flashed upon them that these were no mere animal remains, "but ' the bones of human beings like themselves, who had lived and toiled and loved, and reaching the last bourne had lain down to sleep. They had been laid to rest iin a "sure and certain hope" that the grave should one day give up her dead — not in this ghastly and unnatural manner, not to be torn from consecrated earth and tossed among tho tangle and wrack of cruel seas. To thoso who saw it the spectacle was a terror, a nightmare. It brought, death before them in all its crude materialism. Yet, to tho sleepers themselves — what did it matter? The true consecration of the dead is that their bodies should return to their elements, whether it be dust to dust or dust to water. But the voracity of the sea has not been content with swallowing graveyards with their mounds and headstones. In places, it is truo, as at Dunwich, we may 6till see a mined church standing gaunt and desolate on the cliffs, waiting drearily for t.he sea to complete its destruction ; but this very church at Dunwich is only the last survivor of many that now lie beneath the tumbling waves. There are a few others like it along the coast — single relics, it may be, of villages or towns that were once busy and populous, but whose places now know them no more. The sea has come and devoured. At first the waves only washed or lapped at the churchyard wall, scattering its spray on the graves when winds were high ; then the wall itself crumbled and fell, leaving the sea to work its will among the mounds that had; covered mon and women and little children. There might be some effort at protection ; tho sentiment that craves an undisturbed burial is very strong in human nature — so strong that none of man's work has survived longer than his tombs. But the attempt of a few villagers or townsfolk could do little to stay the inevitable advance ; their house of prayer, their garden of sleep, had been established, it may not be on actual sand, like the house of the parable, but on soft measures of soil or crumbling rock, which could never resist tho wash of these narrow seas. More and more of the churchyard path wus swallowed ; the chasms and fissures yawned below the porch itself ; the church had to bo left to its' fate. There came a heavier autumn storm than usual, or a blustering March wind; the church fell piecemeal, or perhaps in one crash of ruin, into the chafing and boiling foam. The end may havo come s6 suddenly that the very bells had not been saved from the belfry. In time there went lorth a legend that fishera artd others rocking on the calm waters at nightfall could hear the sound of the curfow rising from the buried church beneath the waters ; there are many such stories of buried bells around the const of England, accompanied with fanciful pictures of towers and walls descried when winds are still and seas are clenr. But the bells that the fisherfolk hear are those of distant parishes, enrried, it may be, many miles along the surfaco of the water ; the pictures (yo those o;f imagination ; shattered church and rifled graveyard lie cumbered in sand and boulders and clinging debris — belfry and pulpit and ivied porch havo aliko suffered "a sea-change." —St. James's Budget.

To get the cream of railway humour you must go to Ireland. An Irish railway porter simply can't help being funny. Only the other day a zealous luggage smasher wrathfully pulled a gentleman out of a third-closs carriage because he had a first-class ticket. "Cheating tho company," ho called it. It must have been a relative of his who walked down a. plationn, put his head into oach carriage of a train, and asked. "Is there tiny one there for here?" But even this genius was eclipsed by » brother on tho lino who, before Iho dcp.trluio of an express, fiercely rang a bell and bellowed in gloomy warning, "This train ehtops nowhsro at all."-