Not only the Major's great plan, but all the lower line of old Bruntsea, was knocked to pieces, and lost to knowledge in freaks of wind-lashed waters. Men and women were running about with favorite bits of furniture, or feather-beds, or babies' cradles, or whatever they had caught hold of. The butt ends of the three old streets that led down toward the sea-ground were dipped, as if playing seesaw in the surf, and the storm made gangways of them and lighthouses of the lamp-posts. The old public-house at the corner was down, and the waves leaping in at the post-office door, and wrecking the globes of the chemist.
“Drift and dash, and roar and rush, and the devil let loose in the thick of it. My eyes are worn out with it. Take the glass, Erema, and tell us who is next to be washed away. A new set of clothes-props for Mrs. Mangles I paid for the very day I came back from town.”
With these words, the lord of the submarine manor (whose strength of spirit amazed me) offered his pet binocular, which he never went without upon his own domain. And fisherman Barnes, as we rose and fell, once more saved us from being “swamped” by his clever way of paddling through a scallop in the stern, with the board about the first floor front to let.
The seamen, just keeping way on the boat, sheltered their eyes with their left hands, and fixed them on the tumultuous scene.
I also gazed through the double glass, which was a very clear one; but none of us saw any human being at present in any peril.
“Old pilot was right, after all,” said one; “but what a good job as it come o' middle day, and best of all of a Sunday!”
“I have heered say,” replied another, “that the like thing come to pass nigh upon three hunder years agone. How did you get your things out, Jem Bishop?”
Jem, the only one of them whose house was in the havoc, regarded with a sailor's calmness the entry of the sea through his bedroom window, and was going to favor us with a narrative, when one of his mates exclaimed,
“What do I see yonner, lads? Away beyond town altogether. Seemeth to me like a fellow swimming. Miss, will you lend me spy-glass? Never seed a double-barreled one before. Can use him with one eye shut, I s'pose?”
“No good that way, Joe,” cried Barnes, with a wink of superior knowledge, for he often had used this binocular. “Shut one eye for one barrel—stands to reason, then, you shut both for two, my son.”