My little Tess came to me, a sea upcast, after one of our great northeast gales. I myself found her: lying where the waves had landed her on the shingle, and where they had left her with the fall of the tide.  
I was but a bit of a lad myself, then, going on to be eight years old. Storms had no fright in them for me in those days. What I most was thinking about when one was blowing—while[177] my poor mother, if my father was out in his boat, would be looking wild-eyed seaward, or in the bed-room praying for him on her knees—was what I'd be picking up on the shingle when the gale was over and the sea gone down. Later on, when I came to know that at the gale's end I might be lying myself on the shingle, along with the other wreckage, I got to looking at storms in a different way.
 
That blow that brought my Tess to me had no fears in it for my poor mother, seeing that it came in the night time and my father safe at home. The noise of my father getting up wakened me; and in a sleepy way I watched him from my little bed, when he had the lamp lighted, hurrying his clothes on that he might go down to where his boat was hauled up on the shingle and heave her with the capstan still higher above the on-run of the waves. And as I lay there, very drowsy, watching my father drag his big boots on and hearing the roar of the wind and feeling the shaking that it was giving to our house-walls, there came suddenly the sharp loud bang of a gun.
 
My father stopped as he heard it—with one leg in the air and his hands gripping the boot-straps, I can see him now. "That's from close[178] by!" he said. "God help them—they must be ashore on the Barnard Bank!" Then he jammed his other boot on, jumped into his sou'wester, and was gone on a run. My mother ran to the door—I know now, having myself helped to get men ashore from wrecked ships at my life's peril, what her fear was—and called after him into the darkness: "Don't thou go to putting thy life in danger, George May!" What she said did no good. The wind swallowed her words before they got to him. For a minute or two she stood in the doorway, all blown about; then, putting her weight on it, she got the door shut and came back into the bed-room and knelt by the bedside praying for him. I still was very drowsy. Presently I went off to sleep again, thinking—God forgive me for it!—that if a ship had stranded on the Barnard I'd find some pretty pickings when morning came and the storm was over and I could get down to the shore.
 
And that was my first thought when I wakened, and found the sun shining and the wind blowing no more than a gentle breeze. My father was home again, and safe and sound. There had been no chance for a rescue, he said—the ship being deep down in the sands, and all her[179] people swept out of her, by the time that daylight came. And so I bolted my breakfast, and the very minute that I had it inside of me I was off down the cliff-path and along the beach northward to find what I could find. All the other Southwold boys were hurrying that way too; but our house being up at the north end of the village gave me the start of al............