seeing the imminent danger of his friend swam out again, but without success, and returned greatly exhausted. The unfortunate gentleman was the third son of Mr. Theodore Bagster, of Great St. Helens, who, with an elder son, was sitting on a machine at the time and witnessed the painful occurrence. £10 was offered for the recovery of the
body.
An Unfortunate Church.
What with the repeated falls of cliff, the crushing in of the building, the several disputes between incumbents, organists and others, together with the generally unfortunate position of the first built place of worship, it is neither irrelevant nor irreverent to bestow upon it the epithet of "An Unfortunate Church". Details of the circumstances to which reference is here made may be found in the earlier volumes of this history. But there was probably, no event in which the worshipers at that church were so painfully interested as in the story now to be told of the pulpit being occupied by an incumbent who, as it turned out, was a returned convict, and who had assumed a name that was not his own. The story is here commence with the reproduction of a leading article in "Bretts St. Leonards Gazette", of May 22th, 1864. An unfortunate church! a truly unfortunate church! Such is the expression which continues to escape the lips of our townspeople in connection with the original edifice devoted to sacred purposes in St. Leonards on sea. And such, indeed, has been the significant qualification as applied to that building almost from the commencement. Well we know that there are unfortunate ships and unfortunate people, but why they should be unfortunate may ever continue to be less within the scope of mortal ken. Someone has somewhere said that our patron saints were not equally good, and some not good at all. If then, it be true - forgetting for the once, the paradox - that there are good saints and bad saints, it may be logically inferred that there fortunate saints and unfortunate saints. Granting, for the sake of argument, that such is the case, it would seem to follow as a reasonable sequence that our unfortunate church must have been dedicated to an unfortunate saint. Assuming then without stopping to enquire who and what St. Leonard really was that the dedication of our church to that saint was an unfortunate mistake, we seem to get, as it were a sufficient due to the lack of good fortune ever attendant on the building under consideration. It appears never to have been the right church in the right place. Local history tells us that the foundation of the church was originally laid on the high ground of the West cliff, and that Mr Burton was induced to abandon the site in consequence of objections to its exposed situation. Then, as it could not be on the hill, it must be under the hill; and so, instead of having its light to shine before men on a hill of Zion,-
