And she staggered up and rushed forth.
What was that dark thing on the beach? It was a great boat—it was his yawl, bottom up.
She knew little more for a time after that. She saw people hurrying towards her and towards the wreck; then all was a mist for hours.
But they found poor Joe beneath the yawl, and they bore him in and laid him in the little “best” room. He was dead and stiff, with cold, hard hands half clenched, and in one a morsel of rope. It was the end of the main sheet he had grasped in his hour of agony, and they cut it off and left it there.
Her grief, they say, when she awoke at last, was past describing. With a wail of widowed anguish, that thrilled through the hearts of the sea-hardened listeners she flung herself on the body.
“My Joe, my Joe—my own poor boy!” she moaned. “Oh, why has Heaven deprived me of my man!”
They simply turned away and left her to her grief. They thought it best, but there was not a man among them whose face was not wet with tears.
That was my first sorrow; but, alas! there were more to come.
And it is strange the effect that sorrow has on the young. Before this, all my life had seemed one long happy dream. But all at once I became awake, and I date my real existence from the day they laid poor Joe Gray in the little churchyard, high above the sea, that will sing his requiem for ever and for ay.