CHAPTER XII.
HE ARRIVES HOME.
He had scarcely uttered these words when a shock ran through the ship for all the world as though the heave of the swell had let her fall with violence upon some hard shoal. The decks trembled as though to an explosion. The tremor of the fabric seemed to enter into one’s very marrow, and it would be impossible to express the sense of dismay it excited, happening as it did on a black night, and in the middle of the wide ocean where we knew there could be no shoals for hundreds of leagues.
The light at the yard-arm vanished; there was a noise of hurrying feet forwards, with a rumbling of exclamations uttered in agitation.
“What was that?” was shouted from the companion-hatch in the captain’s familiar accents. “Mr. Johnson?”
“Sir?”
“What have we struck? Is there any ship near us?”
“I don’t know, sir,” answered the mate; “it has been as black as thunder all through.”
“Get a cast of the lead,” exclaimed the captain, but quietly, with no note of hurry in his voice; “send the carpenter aft to sound the pumps; get lanterns up to show a light over the side.”
The blow felt as though the ship had struck some floating wreck. In a minute the vessel was wide awake. The shock had aroused the sleepers, who came tumbling up pell-mell out of cabin and forecastle. The decks, which before were of a death-like stillness, were now alive with sailors running about, with passengers full of excitement and fear, with lanterns briskly travelling from place to place, with one stationary one at the pumps, where the white-haired carpenter stood lowering his sounding-rod, with the deliberation of a Scotchman, down the well.