S2 THE OCTOPUS. 



she broke up, the sewing-machines, metal pails, and other ''Yankee 

 notions" with which she had been laden, were rolled and tumbled 

 on the beach by the breakers in a pitiable condition and sad 

 confusion. Amongst her cargo were a hundred casks of lamp- 

 black ; and at intervals one and another of these would burst with 

 a crash, and the contents fly out in clouds, like smoke from a 

 gun. The soft impalpable powder did not mix readily with the 

 water, and was carried to the shore and inland by the strong sea- 

 breeze. The coast-guards' white buildings gradually assumed the 

 hue of the inside of a boiler-flue ; the beach, the grass, and the 

 roads in the vicinity looked as if fifty thousand chimney-sweeps 

 had emptied their soot-bags over them ; and the stuff fell lightly 

 and gently, like a dust shower, over the throng of anxious 

 spectators, until the ladies appeared as if they were dressed in 

 deep mourning for the catastrophe, and the faces of all, moistened 

 by the salt spray, and bespattered and powdered with the subtle 

 material, became as black as a negro's, and as shiny as a well- 

 blacked stove. A visitor arriving suddenly amongst them, with- 

 out access to a looking-glass, might well have believed that he 

 had discovered a colony of panic-stricken Christy minstrels. The 

 sublime, the sorrowful, and the ridiculous have, perhaps, never been 

 more intimately blended than in that scene of dashing, foaming 

 breakers, tossed and battered wreckage, and smutted faces. Even 

 Denys De Montfort's "colossal poulpe," which he described as 

 deluging a ship from its syphon tube, would not have had an ink- 

 bag large enough to produce such an effect by its contents. 



