Our roof bends over us unchanged. Berg (his dog) is still in our confidence, and well deserves it. The nine soft, furry friends of ours are well, and Kit rules them with a steady claw. Peggy is well and warm.... I never knew game so scarce since I came to Morwenstow; except some woodcocks, which I sent to the bishop as usual in October and November, we have had literally none.
And now for one of those waste things, a word of advice. You are in what is called by snobs a fast college. I earnestly advise you to eschew fast men. I am now suffering from the effects of silly and idle outlay in Oxford. I do hope that nothing will induce you to accept that base credit which those cormorants, the Oxford tradesmen, always try to force on freshmen, in order to harass and rob them afterwards. No fast undergraduate in all my remembrance ever settled down into a respectable man. Ask God for strong angels, and He will fulfil your prayer. Never forget Him, and He will never neglect you.
CHAPTER V
The Inhabitants of Morwenstow in 1834—Cruel Coppinger—Whips the Parson of Kilkhampton—Gives Tom Tape a Ride—Tristam Pentire—Parminter and his Dog Satan—The Gauger’s Pocket—Wrecking—The Wrecker and the Ravens—The Loss of the Margaret Quail—The Wreck of the Ben Coolan—“A Croon on Hennacliff”—Letters concerning Wrecks—The Donkeys and the Copper Ore—The Ship Morwenna—Flotsam and Jetsam—Wrecks on 14th Nov., 1875—Bodies in Poundstock Church—The Loss of the Caledonia—The Wreck of the Phœnix and of the Alonzo.
When the Rev. R. S. Hawker came to Morwenstow in 1834, he found that he had much to contend with, not only in the external condition of church and vicarage, but also in that which is of greater importance.
A writer in the John Bull says: “He found a manse in ruins, and partly used as a barn; a parish peopled with wreckers, smugglers and Dissenting Bryanites; and a venerable church, deserted and ill-cared for, amidst a heap of weeds and nettles. Desolate as was the situation of the grey old sanctuary and tower, standing out upon the rugged incline that shelves down a descent of 300 feet to the beach, it was not more barren of external comfort than was the internal state of those who had been confided to his pastoral care.
“The farmers of the parish were simple-hearted and respectable; but the denizens of the hamlet, after receiving the wages of the harvest time, eked out a precarious existence in the winter, and watched eagerly and expectantly for the shipwrecks that were certain to happen, and upon the plunder of which they surely calculated for the scant provision of their families. The wrecked goods supplied them with the necessaries of life, and the rended planks of the dismembered vessel contributed to the warmth of the hovel hearthstone.
“When Mr. Hawker came to Morwenstow, ‘the cruel and covetous natives of the strand, the wreckers of the seas and rocks for flotsam and jetsam,’ held as an axiom and an injunction to be strictly obeyed:—
Save a stranger from the sea,