Descriptive letterpress printed opposite this photograph:

A BREAKING WAVE.

“Down on the shore, on the stormy shore!

Beset by a growling sea,

Whose mad waves leap on a rocky steep

Like wolves up a traveller’s tree;

Where the foam flies wide, and an angry blast

Blows the curlew off with a screech;

Where the brown sea-wrack, torn up by the roots,

Is flung out of fishes’ reach;

Where the tall ship rolls on the hidden shoals,

And scatters her planks on the beach.”

THE irregular, heaving, tumbling billows of deep water, when drawing near the shore, gather themselves up into a long well-set line, compact and firm as that of well-trained cavalry for a charge on a battle field, the pace increasing with every stride, provoking and lashing itself into passionate fury, until at last in it comes with a rush, leaping up with a last bound before breaking in a roar of impotent noise and blinding spray on the beach. Who has not watched with interest this warfare of the elements? One wave succeeding another, each seemingly more furious, more determined to advance farther than the last! and then those suspicious-looking black pinnacles of rock around which the broken water foams and rages! Not a pleasant coast for a ship to be found in close proximity to in dark December. We remember such a spectacle amidst a similar scene on the north-west coast of Scotland. It was a wild afternoon- the last day of the year. Being Sunday, most of the inhabitants of the small fishing village near were assembled at the little kirk by the shore. On hearing that a big ship was coming in, the minister was soon left alone in the pulpit, his congregation all crowding to the cliffs. She proved to be a great American cotton-ship, dismasted, unmanageable, scarce knowing where she was, but too plainly and inevitably coming headlong upon the pitiless rocks. Gathered in a group on the forecastle of the doomed ship stood the officers, crew, and a few passengers, awaiting in silence their terrible fate. They had not long to wait-a very brief interval of tossing and plunging, and on she came. One crash- a rebound⎯another, and another, and then where a huge ship appeared a few minutes before, the seething waves were dotted with planks, broken spars, bales of cotton, and drowning seamen.