coast-men are there, too, life-boats and all."

So they were; and Ham was right about the vessel, though not a mast was
left standing in her now. If there had been, indeed, she might have been
kept off the breakers, as they afterwards learned. She had been
dismasted in the storm, but had not struck until after daylight that
morning, and help had been close at hand and promptly given. There was
no such thing as saving that unfortunate hull. She would beat to pieces
just where she lay, sooner or later, according to the kind of weather
that might take the job in hand, and the size and force of the waves it
should bring with it.

The work done already by the life-boat men had been a good one; and it
had not been very easy, either, for they had brought the crew and
passengers safely through the boiling surf, and landed them all upon the
sandy beach. They had even saved for them some items of baggage. In a
few hours the coast "wrecking-tugs" would be on hand to look out for the
cargo. There was therefore no chance for the 'long-shore men to turn an
honest penny without working hard for it. Work and wages enough there
would be, to be sure, helping to unload, whenever the sea, now so heavy,
should go down a little; but "work" and "wages" were not the precise
things some of them were most hungry for.

Two of them, at all events,--one a tall, grizzled, weather-beaten,
stoop-shouldered old man, in tattered raiment, and the other more
battered still, but with no "look of the sea" about him,--stood on a
sand-drift, gloomily gazing at the group of shipwrecked people on the
shore, and the helpless mass of timber and spars out there among the
beatings of the surf.