But he has caught at a loose bit of running rigging as he fell, and I see it slipping off the coil upon the deck. I shout madly—man overboard!—and—catch the rope, when I can see nothing again. The sea is too high, and the man too heavy for me. I shout, and shout, and shout, and feel the perspiration starting in great beads from my forehead as the line slips through my fingers.
Presently the captain feels his way aft, and takes hold with me; and the cook comes, as the coil is nearly spent, and we pull together upon him. It is desperate work for the sailor, for the ship is drifting at a prodigious rate, but he clings like a dying man.
By and by at a flash, we see him on a crest, two oars’ length away from the vessel.
“Hold on, my man!” shouts the captain.
“For God’s sake, be quick!” says the poor fellow; and he goes down in a trough of the sea. We pull the harder, and the captain keeps calling to him to keep up courage, and hold strong. But in the hush we hear him say—“I can’t hold out much longer—I’m most gone!”
Presently we have brought the man where we can lay hold of him, and are only waiting for a good lift of the sea to bring him up, when the poor fellow groans out—“It’s of no use—I can’t—good-by!” And a wave tosses the end of the rope, clean upon the bulwarks.
At the next flash I see him going down under the water.
I grope my way below, sick and faint at heart; and wedging myself into my narrow berth, I try to sleep. But the thunder and the tossing of the ship, and the face of the drowning man, as he said good-by—peering at me from every corner will not let me sleep.
Afterward, come quiet seas, over which we boom along, leaving in our track, at night, a broad path of phosphorescent splendor. The sailors bustle around the decks as if they had lost no comrade; and the voyagers losing the pallor of fear, look out earnestly for the land.
At length my eyes rest upon the coveted fields of Britain; and in a day more, the bright face, looking out beside me, sparkles at sight of the sweet cottages, which lie along the green Essex shores. Broad-sailed yachts, looking strangely, yet beautifully, glide upon the waters of the Thames, like swans; black, square-rigged colliers from the Tyne, lie grouped in sooty cohorts; and heavy, three-decked Indiamen—of which I had read in story books—drift slowly down with the tide. Dingy steamers, with white pipes, and with red pipes, whiz past us to the sea, and now my eye rests on the great palace of Greenwich; I see the wooden-legged pensioners smoking under the palace walls; and above them upon the hill—as Heaven is true—that old, fabulous Greenwich, the great center of schoolboy longitude.