It is pleasant to finds Swedish paper full of a
story of the hero- ism displayed by English villagers in rescuing the crew of the Swedish steamer Gustave ' from drowning. The story is told in the Dagens IVyheter, of Stockholm. It seems that on the 16th January, in a fog, the ' Gustave ' went ashore at Cresswell, a little Northumbrian village five miles to the north of the town of Newbiggin. The crew were all in imminent danger of drowning. The lifeboat was manned by thirteen out of the fifteen male inhabitants of Cresswell, and only two old fishermen and the women were left ashore, and these waded deep into the sea to get the lifeboat afloat. But the lifeboat could not get at the wreck without a rocket apparatus, and a girl, 'Bells,' went off to New- biggin to get it, wading through the bays to shorten the distance, and she had walked in this way ten miles, when she came back from her errand. She was so benumbed by her wet clothing —she had had her wet clothes on six hours — that she had the next morning, after all the crew were saved, a sharp attack of cramps. The Swedish writer, commenting on this girl's achievement, says — "Who those shipwrecked people were was unknown to her ; to what country they belonged was all the same to her ; it was a question of human life that might be saved by her means. I opened the family Bible, the sole ornament of that unassuming room, and there read the name
of 'Isabella Brown, born 1853.' Fortunate the country which possesses men and women like those who on that icy January night flew to the rescue of the Swedish steamer Gustave' and its crew." And fortunate, too, the country whose people feel and realise so gratefully the courage and devotion by which they have been saved.
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