When you will, you shall have Nay.

While the vessel was riding to the ebb tide, as she had done all the morning, a warp which had been laid out from her port quarter would have canted her head well into the stream; and the tide, acting on her starboard bow while the after-part was in comparatively still water, would have winded her downwards, almost before her paddles were in motion, or her rudder could be brought to act. But the turn of the tide had reversed all this. The vessel had indeed swung to the flood, which by this time was rattling up at the rate of five or six miles an hour, and thus her bowsprit was looking the way she wanted to go; but a strong eddy was now bubbling up under her starboard bow, and pressing it towards the left bank, while a great lumbering Indiaman lay just ahead of her, and a Hamburgh steamer, which had anchored a little higher up on her starboard quarter, forbade all reversing of the engine and thus getting out of the mess stern foremost.

The moment the anchor broke ground the helm was put hard a-port, and the paddles were set in motion; but though from the tide alone the rudder had some effect, the strength of the eddy was too much for her; round came her head to port, as if she were going to take a leap at the embankment.

“Hard a-port!—hard a-starboard!—ease her!—stop her!—turn her a-head!” were the contradictory orders bawled out almost simultaneously. If noise and shouting could have got the steamer out of the scrape, there was no lack of it; but all these cries, energetic as they were, produced no effect whatever, beyond exciting a little suspicion in the mind of our travellers (some of whom having been at sea before, knew the stem of a ship from the stern) that the skipper was not altogether a “deacon in his craft;” and thus giving a point to the Mate’s silent but expressive shrug when the Parson had alluded to the shoals at the river’s mouth. At last, an indescribable sensation of grating, and a simultaneous volley of heterogeneous oaths, such as sailors shot their guns with on grand occasions, announced the fact that she had taken the ground abaft.

This, however, as it turned out, was about the best thing that could have happened, for it gave the skipper time to collect his senses; or, what was more to the purpose, gave the Mate time to whisper in his ear; and the rising tide was sure to float her again in ten minutes. By this time a warp had been got out to a ship anchored upon the Surrey side, an expedient which any sailor would have thought of before tripping his anchor in the first instance. The end of it was passed round the windlass and hove taut, and as the rising water slowly lifted the unlucky vessel from her sludgy bed and a few turns brought a strain upon her, she gradually slewed her head outwards. The steam was turned on, the paddles went round; the black water began to fizz under her counter, as if a million of bottles of stout had been poured into it—she was at last a-weigh and fairly on her course, only about six hours after her proper time.

“I tell you what,” said the Parson, as he dived down the companion to inspect the submarine arrangements of the cabin, “I leave this vessel at Christiansand, and I wish we were fairly out of her. This fellow knows no more of sea-craft than a tailor. Kind Providence shield us, or we shall come to grief yet!”

CHAPTER III.
THE SHIPWASH SAND.

“Our ship,

Which but three glasses since we gave out split,