“I was only a boy, Nie,” replied my friend. “I’ve had many a sleep in the cradle of the deep since then.”
“I was reading this morning,” I said, “of that terrible shipwreck in the Atlantic. It puts me in mind of the loss of the London. I was in the Bay of Biscay in that very gale, Ben; our vessel unmanageable, wallowing in the trough of the seas, the waves making a clean breach over us; and, Ben, at the very darkest hour of midnight, we saw, by the lightning’s gleam, a great ship stagger past us. We were so close that we could have pitched a coil of rope on board. There were no men on her decks; her masts were carried away, and her bulwarks gone, and it was evident she was foundering fast. There were more ships lost, Ben, that night in the Bay of Biscay than ever we shall know of—
“‘Till the sea gives up its dead.’”
Chapter Ten.
“Throned in his palace of cerulean ice,
Here Winter holds his unrejoicing court.”
Thomson’s “Seasons.”
