MY DANISH SWEETHEART

A Novel

BY W. CLARK RUSSELL

AUTHOR OF 'THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR,' 'THE LIFE OF ADMIRAL LORD COLLINGWOOD,' 'A MARRIAGE AT SEA,' ETC., ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.

Methuen & Co.
18, BURY STREET, LONDON, W.C.
1891
[All rights reserved]

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

MY DANISH SWEETHEART.

CHAPTER I.

A SULLEN DAY.

On the morning of October 21, in a year that one need not count very far back to arrive at, I was awakened from a light sleep into which I had fallen after a somewhat restless night by a sound as of thunder some little distance off, and on going to my bedroom window to take a view of the weather I beheld so wild and forbidding a prospect of sea and sky that the like of it is not to be imagined.

The heavens were a dark, stooping, universal mass of vapour—swollen, moist, of a complexion rendered malignant beyond belief by a sort of greenish colour that lay upon the face of it. It was tufted here and there into the true aspect of the electric tempest; in other parts, it was of a sulky, foggy thickness; and as it went down to the sea-line it wore, in numerous places, a plentiful dark shading that caused the clouds upon which this darkness rested to look as though their heavy burthen of thunder was weighing their overcharged breasts down to the very sip of the salt.

A small swell was rolling in betwixt the two horns of cliff which framed the wide bight of bay that I was overlooking. The water was very dark and ugly with its reflection of the greenish, sallowish atmosphere that tinged its noiseless, sliding volumes. Yet spite of the shrouding shadow of storm all about, the horizon lay a clear line, spanning the yawn of ocean and heaven betwixt the foreland points.

There was nothing to be seen seaward; the bay, too, was empty. I stood for a little while watching the cloud of foam made by the swell where it struck upon the low, black ledge of what we call in those parts Deadlow Rock, and upon the westernmost of the two fangs of reef, some little distance away from the Rock, and named by the sailors hereabouts the Twins; I say I stood watching this small play of white water and hearkening for another rumble of thunder; but all remained hushed—not a breath of air—no glance of dumb lightning.

On my way to the parlour I looked in upon my mother, now an old lady, whose growing infirmities obliged her to keep her bed till the day was advanced. I kissed and greeted her.

'It seems a very dark melancholy morning, Hugh,' says she.

'Ay, indeed,' I answered. 'I never remember the like of such a sky as is hanging over the water. Did you hear the thunder just now, mother?'

She answered no, but then, to be sure, she was a little deaf.

'I hope, Hugh,' said she, with a shake of her head and smoothing her snow-white hair with a hand that slightly trembled, 'that it may not end in a lifeboat errand. I had a wretched dream last night. I saw you enter the boat and sail into the bay. The sun was high and all was bright and clear; but on a sudden the weather grew black—dark as it now is. The wind swept the water, which leaped high and boiled. You and the men strove hard to regain the land, and then gave up in despair, and you put right before the wind, and the boat sped like an arrow into the gloom and haze; and just before she vanished a figure rose by your side where you sat steering, and gazed at me thus'—she placed her forefinger upon her lip in the posture of one commanding silence. 'It was your father, Hugh: his face was full of entreaty and despair.' She sighed deeply. 'How clearly does one sometimes see in dreams!' she added. 'Never was your father's face in his dear life more distinct to my eyes than in this vision.'

'A Friday night's dream told on a Saturday!' said I, laughing; 'no chance of its coming true, though. No fear of the Janet'—for that was the name of our lifeboat—'blowing out to sea. Besides, the bay is empty. There can be no call. And supposing one should come and this weather should burst into a hurricane, I'd rather be afloat in the Janet than in the biggest ship out of London or Liverpool docks;' and so saying I left her, never giving her dream or her manner another thought.

After I had breakfasted I walked down to the esplanade to view the Janet as she lay snug in her house. I was her coxswain, and how it happened that I filled that post I will here explain.

My father, who had been a captain in the merchant service, had saved money, and invested his little fortune in a couple of ships, in one of which, fifteen years before the date of this story, he had embarked to take a run in her from the river Thames to Swansea, where she was to fill up with cargo for a South American port. She was a brand-new ship, and he wished to judge of her sea-going qualities. When she had rounded the North Foreland the weather thickened; it came on to blow a gale of wind; the vessel took the ground somewhere near the North Sand Head, and of twenty-three people aboard of her fifteen perished, my father being among those who were drowned.

His brother—my uncle, George Tregarthen—was a well-to-do merchant in the City of London, and in memory of my father's death, which grieved him to the soul, and which, with the loss of the others, had come about through delay in sending help from the land—for they fired guns and burnt flares, and the adjacent light-ship signalled with rockets that a vessel was ashore; but all to no purpose, for when the rescue was attempted the ship was breaking up, and most of her people were corpses, as I have said—my uncle, by way of memorializing his brother's death, at his own cost presented the little town in which my father had lived with a lifeboat, which he called the Janet, after my mother. I was then too young to take a part in any services she rendered; but by the time I had reached the age of twenty I was as expert as the smartest boatman on our part of the coast, and as I claimed a sort of captaincy of the lifeboat by virtue of her as a family gift, I replaced the man who had been her coxswain, and for the last two years had taken her helm during the six times she had been called upon; and not a little proud was I to be able to boast that, under my charge, the Janet in those two years had rescued twenty-three men, five women, and two children from certain death.

No man could love his dog or his horse—indeed, I may say, no man could love his sweetheart—with more fondness than I loved my boat. She was a living thing, to my fancy, even when she was high and dry. She seemed to appeal to me out of a vitality that might well have passed for human, to judge of the moods it kindled in me. I would sit and view her, and think of her afloat, figure some dreadful scene of shipwreck, some furious surface of seething yeast, with a ship in the heart of it, coming and going amid storms of spray; and then I would picture the boat crushing the savage surge with her shoulder, as she stormed through the tremendous play of ocean on her way to the doomed craft whose shrouds were thick with men; until such emotions were raised in me that I have known myself almost unconsciously to make an eager step to the craft, and pat her side, and talk to her as though she were living and could understand my caress and whispers.

My mother was at first strongly opposed to my risking my life in the Janet. She said I was not a sailor, least of all was I of the kind who manned these boats, and for some time she would not hear of me going as coxswain in her, except in fine weather or when there was little risk. But when, as coxswain, I had brought home my first little load of precious human freight—five Spaniards, with the captain's wife and a little baby, wrapped in a shawl, against her heart—my mother's reluctance yielded to her pride and gratitude. She found something beautiful, noble, I had almost said divine, in this life-saving—in this plucking of poor human souls from the horrible jaws of Death—in the hope and joy, too, raised in the heart of the shipwrecked by the sight of the boat, or in the supporting animation which came from knowledge that the boat would arrive in time, and which enabled men to bear up, when, perhaps, had there been no promise of a boat coming to them, they must have drooped and surrendered their spirits to God.

Well, as I have said, I went down to the esplanade, where the boat-house was, to take a look at the boat, which was, indeed, my regular daily custom, one I could find plenty of leisure for, since I was without occupation, owing to a serious illness that had baulked my efforts six years before, and that had left me too old for another chance in the same way—and without will, either, for the matter of that; for my mother's income was abundant for us both, and, when it should please God to take her, what was hers would be mine, and there was more than enough for my plain wants.

Before entering the house I came to a stand to light a pipe and cast a look around. The air was so motionless that the flame of the match I struck burnt without a stir. I took notice of a slight increase in the weight of the swell which came brimming into the bay out of the wide, dark field of the Atlantic Ocean: for that was the sea our town faced, looking due west from out of the shadow of the Cornwall heights, at the base of which it stood—a small, solid heap of granite-coloured buildings dominated by the tall spire of the church of St. Saviour, the gilt cross atop of which gleamed this morning against the scowl of the sky as though the beam of the risen sun rested upon it.

The dark line of the broad esplanade went winding round with the trend of shore to the distance of about a mile. The dingy atmosphere gave it a colouring of chocolate, and the space of white sand which stretched to the wash of the water had the glance of ivory from the contrast. The surf was small, but now that I was near I could catch a note in the noise of it as it foamed in a cloudy line upon the sand, which made me think of the voice of a distant tempest, as though each running fold brought with it, from far past the sea-line, some ever-dying echo of the hurricane's rage there. But a man had need to live long at the seaside to catch these small accents of storm in the fall and pouring of the unvexed breaker.

A number of white-breasted gulls, with black-edged wings, were flying close inshore this side the Deadlow Rock and Twins: their posture was in the main one of hovering and peering, and there was a sort of subdued expectancy rather than restlessness in their motions; but they frequently uttered sharp cries, and were certainly not afishing, for they never stooped. Within a stone's-throw of the lifeboat house was a coastguard's hut, a little place for keeping a look-out from, marked by a flag-post; and the preventiveman, with a telescope under his arm, stood in the doorway, talking to an aged boatman named Isaac Jordan. The land past that flagstaff went in a rise, and soared into a very noble height of dark cliff, the extremity of which we called Hurricane Point. It looked a precipitous, deadly, inhospitable terrace of rocks in the dismal light of that leaden morning. The foreland rose out of the bed of foam which was kept boiling at the iron base by the steadfast hurl of the Atlantic swell; yet Hurricane Point made a fine shelter of our bay when the wind came out from the north, and I have seen the sea there bursting and soaring into the air in volumes of steam, and the water a mile and a half out running wide and wild and white with the whipping of the gale, when, within, a wherry might have strained to her painter without shipping a cupful of water.

There was an old timber pier going into the sea from off a projection of land, upon the northernmost point of which the lifeboat house stood; this pier had a curl like the crook of a sailor's rheumatic forefinger; but it was not possible to find any sort of harbour in the rude, black, gleaming embrace of its pitched and weedy piles, save in smooth and quiet weather. It was an old pier, and had withstood the wash and shocks of fifty years of the Atlantic billow—enough to justify a man in staring at it, since ours was a wild and stormy seaboard, where everything had to be as strong as though we were at sea and had the mighty ocean itself to fight. At times a collier would come sailing round Bishopnose Point, a tall, reddish-hued bluff past Deadlow Rock, and slide within the curve of the pier, and discharge her freight. Here, too, in the seasons might be seen a cluster of fishing-boats, mainly the sharp-ended luggers of Penzance; but this morning, as I have already said, all was vacant from the horizon to the white sweep of sand—vacant and, in a manner, motionless too, with the quality of stagnation that came into the picture out of the sullen, breathless, gloom-laden atmosphere, nothing stirring, as it seemed, save the heave of the swell, and a few active figures of 'longshoremen down by the pier hauling up their boats high and dry upon the sand, with an eye to what was coming in the weather.

I entered the lifeboat house and killed ten minutes or so in surveying the fabric inside and out, and seeing that everything was in readiness should a call come. A ship's barometer—a good instrument—hung against the wall or bulkhead of the wooden edifice. The mercury was low, with a depression in the surface of the metal itself that was like emphasizing the drop.

Our manner of launching the Janet was by means of a strong timber slipway, that went in a pretty sharp declivity from the forefoot of the boat to some fathoms past low-water mark. There could be no better way of getting her water-borne. The sand was flat; there was little to be done with a heavy boat on such a platform, let us have laid what greased woods or rollers we chose under her keel. But from the elevation of her house she fled, when liberated, like a gull into the rage of the water, topping the tallest comber, and giving herself noble way in the teeth of the deadest of inshore hurricanes.

As I stood at the head of this slipway, looking along it to where it buried itself in the dark and sickly green of the flowing heave of the sea, old Isaac Jordan came slowly away from the coastguardsman and saluted me in a voice that trembled under the burthen of eighty-five years. Such another quaint old figure as this might have been hunted for in vain the whole coast round. His eyes, deep-seated in his head seemed to have been formed of agate, so stained and clouded were they by time, by weather, and, no doubt, by drink. His tall hat was bronzed with wear and exposure, the skin of his face lay like a cobweb upon his lineaments, and when he smiled, he exhibited a single tobacco-stained tooth, which made one think of Deadlow Rock. Isaac did not belong to these parts, yet he had lived in the place for above half a century, having been brought ashore from a wreck in which he had been found, the only occupant, lying senseless upon the deck. When he recovered he was without memory, and for five years could not have told his father's name nor the place he hailed from. When at last recollection returned to him, he was satisfied to remain in the corner of this kingdom on which the ocean, so to speak, had cast him, and for fifty years he had never gone half a mile distant from the town unless seaward, and then never beyond the bay, where he would fish for his own feeding, or ply as a carrier between the shore and such ships as brought up.

'Good-marning, Mr. Tregarthen,' said he in the accent of Whitstable, which was his native place; 'reckon there'll be some work afore ye if so be as this here muckiness ain't agoing to blow away;' and he turned up his marbled eyes to the sky in a sort of blind groping way.

'I never remember the like of such a morning as this, Isaac,' said I, going down to him that I might not oblige him to strain his poor old trembling voice.

'Lard love ye!' he exclaimed; 'scores and scores, Mr. Tregarthen. I recollect of just such another marning as this in forty-four; ay, an' an uglier marning yet in thirty-three. That were the day when the Kingfisher went down and drownded all hands saving the dawg.'

'What's going to happen, d'ye think, Isaac?'

'A gale o' wind, master, but not yet. He's a bracing of himself up, and it'll be all day, I allow, afore he's ready;' and once again he cast up his agate-like eyes to the sky. 'What's the day o' the month, sir?' he added with a little briskening up.

'October the 21st, isn't it?'

'Why, Gor bless me! yes, an' so it be!' he exclaimed, with a face whose expression was rendered spasmodic by an assumption of joyful thought. 'The hanniversary of Trafalgar, as sure as my name's Isaac! On this day Lord Nelson was killed. Gor bless me! to think of it! I see him now,' he continued, turning his eyes blindly upon my face. 'There's nothen I forget about him. There's his sleeve lying beautifully pinned agin his breast, and the fin of his decapitated harm a-working full of excitement within; there's his cocked-hat drawed down ower the green shade as lies like a poor man's plaister upon his forehead; there's his one eye a-looking through and through a man as though it were a bradawl, and t'other eye, said to be sightless, a-imitating of the seeing one till ye couldn't ha' told which was which for health. There was spunk in the werry wounds of that gent. He carried his losses as if they was gains. What a man! There ain't public-houses enough in this country, to drink to the memory of such a gentleman's health in. There ain't. That's my complaint, master. Not public-houses enough, I says, seeing what he did for this here Britain.'

Though nobody in Tintrenale (as I choose to call the town) in the least degree believed that old Isaac ever saw Lord Nelson, despite his swearing that he was five years old at the time, and that he could recollect his mother hoisting him up in her arms above the heads of the crowd to view the great Admiral—I say, though no man believed this old fellow, yet we all listened to his assurances as though very willing to credit what he said. In truth, it pleased us to believe that there was a man in our little community who with his own eyes had beheld the famous Sailor, and we let the thing rest upon our minds as a sort of honourable tradition, which we would not very willingly have disturbed. However, more went to this talk of Nelson in old Isaac than met the ear; it was indeed, his way of asking for a drink, and, as he had little or nothing to live upon save what he could collect out of charity, I slipped a couple of shillings into his hand, for which he continued to God-bless me till his voice failed him.

I held my gaze fixed upon the sky for some time, to gather, if possible, the direction in which the great swollen canopy of cloud was moving, that I might know from what quarter to expect the wind when it should arise; but the sullen greenish heaps of shadow hung over the land and sea as motionless as they were dumb. Not the least loose wing of scud was there to be seen moving. It was a wonderfully breathless heaven of tempestuous gloom, with the sea at its confines betwixt the two points of land looking to lift to it in its central part as though swelled, owing to the illusion of the line of livid shade there, and to a depression on either side, caused by a smoky commingling of the atmosphere with the spaces of water.

While I stood surveying the murky scene, that was gradually growing more dim with an insensible thickening of the air, several drops of rain fell, each as large as a half-crown.

'Stand by now for a flash o' lightning,' old Isaac cried in his trembling voice; 'wance them clouds is ripped up, all the water they hold 'll tumble down and make room for the wind!'

But there was no lightning. The rain ceased. The stillness seemed to deepen to my hearing, with a fancy to my consciousness of a closer drawing together of the shadows overhead.

''Tain't so wery warm, neither,' said old Isaac; 'and yet here be as true a tropic show as old Jamaikey herself could prowide.'

Every sound was startlingly distinct—the calls and cries of the fellows near the pier, as they ran their boats up; the grit of the keels on the hard sand, like the noise of skates travelling on ice; the low organlike hum of the larger surf beating upon the coast past Bishopnose Point; the rattle of vehicles in the stony streets behind me; the striking of a church bell—the hoarse bawling of a hawker crying fish: it was like the hush one reads of as happening before an earthquake, and I own to an emotion of awe, and even of alarm, as I stood listening and looking.

I hung about the boat-house for hard upon two hours, expecting every minute to see the white line of the wind sweeping across the sea into the bay; for by this time I had persuaded myself that what motion there was above was out of the westward; but in all that time the glass-smooth dark-green surface of the swell was never once tarnished by the smallest breathing of air. Only one thing that was absent before I now took notice of: I mean a strange, faint, salt smell, as of seaweed in corruption, a somewhat sickly odour of ooze. I had never tasted the like of it upon the atmosphere here; what it signified I could not imagine. One of my boat's crew, who had paused to exchange a few words with me about the weather, called it the smell of the storm, and said that it arose from a distant disturbance working through the sea through leagues and leagues, as the dews of the body are discharged through the pores of the skin.

This same man had walked up to the heights near to Hurricane Point to take a view of the ocean, and now told me there was nothing in sight, save just a gleam of sail away down in the north-west, almost swallowed up in the gloom. He was without a glass, and could tell me no more than that it was the canvas of a ship.

'Well,' said I, 'nothing, if it be not steam, is going to show itself in this amazing calm.' And, saying this, I turned about and walked leisurely home.

We dined at one o'clock. We were but two, mother and son; and the little picture of that parlour arises before me as I write, bringing moisture to my eyes as I recall the dear, good, tender heart never more to be beheld by me in this world—as I see the white hair, the kindly aged face, the wistful looks fastened upon me, and hear the little sighs that would softly break from her when she turned her head to send a glance through the window at the dark malignant junction of sea and sky ruling the open between the points and at the frequent flashing of the foam on those evil rocks grinning upon the heaving waters, away down to the southward. I could perceive that the memory of her dream lay upon her in a sort of shadow. Several times she directed her eyes from my face to the portrait of my father upon the wall opposite her. Yet she did not again refer to the dream. She talked of the ugly appearance of the sky, and asked what the men down about the pier thought of it.

'They are agreed that it is going to end in a gale of wind,' I answered.

'There is no ship in the bay,' said she, raising a pair of gold-rimmed glasses to her eyes and peering through the window.

'No,' said I; 'and the sea is bare, saving a single sail somewhere down in the north-west.'

She smiled, as though at a piece of good news. There could be no summons for the lifeboat, she knew, if the bay and the ocean beyond remained empty.

After dinner, while I sat smoking my pipe close against the fire—for the leaden colour in the air somehow made the atmosphere feel cold, though we were too far west for any touch of autumnal rawness just yet—and while my mother sat opposite me, poring through her glasses upon a local sheet that told the news of the district for the week past—the Rector of Tintrenale, the Rev. John Trembath, happening to pass our window, which was low-seated, looked in, and, spying the outline of my figure against the fire, tapped upon the glass, and I called to him to enter.

'Well, Mr. Coxswain,' says he, 'how is this weather going to end, pray? I hear there's a ship making for this bay.'

'I hope not,' says my mother quietly.

'How far distant is she?' said I.

'Why,' he answered, 'I met old Roscorla just now. He was fresh from Bishopnose way, and told me that there was a square-rigged vessel coming along before a light air of wind out of the west, and apparently heading straight for this bight.'

'She may shift her helm,' said I, who, though no sailor, had yet some acquaintance with the terms of the sea; 'there'll be no shelter for her here if it comes on to blow from the west.'

'And that's where it is coming from,' said Mr. Trembath.

'Oh for a little break of the sky—for one brief gleam of sunshine!' cried my mother suddenly, half starting from her chair as if to go to the window. 'There's something in a day of this kind that depresses my heart as though sorrow were coming. Do you believe in dreams, Mr. Trembath?' And now I saw she was going to talk of her dream.

'No,' said he bluntly; 'it is enough to believe in what is proper for our spiritual health. A dream never yet saved a soul.'

'Do you think so?' said I. 'Yet a man might get a hint in a vision, and in that way be preserved from doing a wrong.'

'What was your dream?' said Mr. Trembath, rounding upon my mother; 'for a dream you have had, and I see the recollection of it working in your face as you look at me.'

She repeated her dream to him.

'Tut! tut!' cried he; 'a little attack of indigestion. A small glass of your excellent cherry brandy would have corrected all these crudities of your slumbering imagination.'

Well, after an idle chat of ten minutes, which yet gave the worthy clergyman time enough to drink to us in a glass of that cherry brandy which he had recommended to my mother, he went away, and shortly afterwards I walked down to the pier to catch a sight of the ship. In all these hours there had been no change whatever in the aspect of the weather. The sky of dark cloud wore the same swollen, moist, and scowling appearance it had carried since the early morn, but the tufted thunder-coloured heaps of vapour had been smoothed out or absorbed by the gathering thickness which made the atmosphere so dark that, though it was scarcely three o'clock in the afternoon, you would have supposed the sun had set. The swell had increased; it was now rolling into the bay with weight and volume, and there was a small roaring noise in the surf already, and a deeper note yet in the sound of it where it boiled seawards past the points. A light air was blowing, but as yet the water was merely brushed by it into wrinkles which put a new dye into the colour of the ocean—a kind of inky green—I do not know how to convey it. Every glance of foam upon the Twins or Deadlow Rock was like a flash of white fire, so sombre was the surface upon which it played.

Hurricane Point shut out the view of the sea in the north-west, even from the pierhead, and the ship was not to be seen. There was a group of watermen on the look-out, one or two of them members of the lifeboat crew; and among these fellows was old Isaac Jordan, who, as I might easily guess, had drunk out my two shillings. He wore a yellow sou'-wester over his long iron-gray hair, and he lurched from one man to another, with his arm extended and his fingers clawing the air, arguing in the shrill voice of old age, thickened by the drams he had swallowed.

'I tell 'ee there's going to be a airthquake,' he was crying as I approached. 'I recollects the likes of this weather in eighteen hunnerd an' eighteen, and there was a quake at midnight that caused the folks at Faversham to git out of their beds and run into the street; 'twor felt at Whitstable, and turned the beer o' th' place sour. Stand by for a airthquake, I says. Here's Mr. Tregarthen, a scholard. The likes of me, as is old enough to be granddad to the oldest of ye all, may raison with a scholard and be satisfied to be put right if so be as he's wrong, when such scow-bankers as you a'n't to be condescended to outside the giving of the truth to ye. And so I says. Mr. Tregarthen——'

But I quietly put him aside.

'No more money for you, Isaac,' said I, 'so far as my purse is concerned, until you turn teetotaler. It is enough to make one blush for one's species to see so old a man——'

'Mr. Tregarthen,' he interrupted, 'you're a gin'man, ain't ye! What have I 'ad? Is a drop o' milk and water going to make ye blush for a man?'

Some of the fellows laughed.

'And how often,' he continued, 'is the hanniversary of the battle o' Trafalgar agoing to come round in a year? Twenty-voorst of October to-day is, and I see him now, Mr. Tregarthen, as I see you—his right fin agoing, his horders upon his breast——'

'Here, come you along with me, Isaac!' exclaimed one of the men, and, seizing the old fellow by the arm, he bore him off.

CHAPTER II.

A NIGHT OF STORM.

I overhung the rail of the pier, looking down upon the heads of the breakers as they dissolved in white water amid the black and slimy supporters of the structure, and sending a glance from time to time towards the northern headland, out of which, I gathered from the men about me, the ship would presently draw, though no one could certainly say as yet that she was bound for our bay, spite of her heading direct in for the land. A half-hour passed, and then she showed: her bowsprit and jibbooms came forking out past the chocolate-coloured height of cliff, and the suddenness of this presentment of white wings of jibs and staysail caused the canvas to look ghastly for the moment against the dark and drooping smoke-coloured sky that overhung the sea where she was—as ghastly, I say, as the gleam of froth is when seen at midnight, or a glance of moonshine dropping spear-like through a rift and making a little pool of light in the midst of a black ocean.

I watched her with curiosity. She was something less than three miles distant, and she drew out very stately under a full breast of sail, rolling her three spires—the two foremost of which were clothed to the trucks—with the majesty of a war-ship. We might now make sure that she was bound for the bay, and meant to bring up. The air was still a very light wind, which made a continuous wonder of the muteness of the storm-shadow that was overhead; and the vessel, which we might now see was a barque of four hundred tons or thereabouts, floated into the bay very slowly. Her canvas swung as she rolled, and made a hurry of light of her, and one saw the glint of the sails broaden in the brows of the swell which chased and underran her, so reflective was the water, spite of the small wrinkling of it by the weak draught.

'A furriner,' said a man near me.

'Ay,' said I, examining her through a small but powerful pocket-telescope; 'that green caboose doesn't belong to an Englishman. She's hoisting her colour! Now I have it—a Dane!'

'What does she want to come here for?' exclaimed another of the little knot of men who had gathered about me. 'Something wrong, I allow.'

'Master drunk, per'aps,' said a third.

'He'll be making a lee zhore of our ugly bit of coast if it comes on to blow from the west'ard, and if not from there, then where else it's coming from who's going to guess?' exclaimed a gruff old fellow, peering at the vessel under a shaggy, contracted brow.

'Her captain may have a trick of the weather above our comprehension,' said I. 'If the gale's to come out of the north, he'll do well where he lets go his anchor; but if it's to be the other way about—well, I suppose some of our chaps will advise him. Maybe he has been tempted by the look of the bay; or he may have a sick or a dead man to land.'

'Perhaps he has a mind to vind us a job to-night zur,' said one of my lifeboat's men.

We continued watching. Presently she began to shorten sail, and the leisurely manner in which the canvas was first clewed up and then rolled up was assurance enough to a nautical eye that she was not overmanned. I could distinguish the figure of a short, squarely-framed man, apparently giving orders from the top of a long house aft, and I could make out the figure of another man, seemingly young, flitting to and fro with a manner of idle restlessness, though at intervals he would pause and sweep the town and foreshore with his telescope.

About this time five men launched a swift, powerful boat of a whaling pattern off the sand on to which it had been dragged that morning, far beyond high-water mark. They ran the little fabric over a line of well-greased planks or skids, and sprang into her as her bow met the first roll of water, and in a breath their oars were out and they were sweeping the boat towards the barque, making the spray spit from the stem to the herculean sweep of the blades. She was a boat that was mainly used for these errands—for putting help aboard ships which wanted it—for taking pilots off and bringing them ashore, and the like. So slow was the motion of the barque that she was still floating into the bay with her anchors at the catheads, and a few heads of men along the yards furling the lighter canvas, when the boat dashed alongside of her. When the stranger was about a mile and a half distant from the point of pier which I watched her from, she let go her topsail halliards—she carried single sails—and a few minutes later her anchor fell, and she swung slowly, with her head to the swell and the light wind.

Scarcely was she straining to the scope of cable that had been paid out, when the boat which had gone to her left her side. The men rowed leisurely; one could tell by the rise and fall of the oars that their errand had proved a disappointment, that there was nothing to be earned, nothing to be done, neither help nor counsel wanted. I walked down to that part of the sands where she would come ashore, but had to wait until her crew had walked her up out of the water before I could get any news. Our town was so dull, our habits of thought so primitive as to be almost childlike—the bay for long spells at a time so barren of all interests, that the arrival of a vessel, if it were not a smack or a collier, excited the sort of curiosity among us that a new-comer raises in a little village. A ship bringing up in the bay was something to look at, something to speculate upon; and then, again, there was always the expectation among the 'longshoremen of earning a few pounds out of her.

I called to one of the crew of the boat after she had been secured high and dry, and asked him the name of the vessel.

'The Anine', says he.

'What's wrong with her?' said I.

'Nothing but fear of the weather, I allow,' said he; 'she's from Cuxhaven, bound to Party Alleggy, or some such a hole away down in the Brazils.'

'Porto Allegre, is it?' said I.

'Ay,' he answered, 'that zounds nearer to the name that vur given to us. She's got a general cargo aboard. The master's laid up in the cabin; the chief mate broke un's leg off Texel, and they zent him into Partsmouth aboard of a zmack. The chap in charge calls himself Damm. I onderstood he'z carpenter, acting as zecond mate. But who's to follow such a lingo as he talks?'

'He's brought up here with the master's sanction, I suppose?'

'Can't tell you that,' he answered, 'for I don't know. 'Pears to me as if this here traverse was Mr. Damm's own working out. He's got a cross-eye, and I don't rightly like his looks. He pointed aloft and zhook his head, and made us understand that he was here for zhelter. Jimmy, meaning one of the boat's crew, pointed to the Twins, and Mr. Damm he grins and says, "Yaw, yaw, dot's right!"'

'But if he's bound to the Brazils,' I said, 'how does it happen that he is on this side the Land's End? Porto Allegre isn't in Wales.'

Here another of the boat's crew who had joined us said, 'I understood from a man who spoke a bit of English that they was bound round to Swansea, but what to take in, atop of a general cargo, I can't say.'

The sailors aboard the vessel were now slowly rolling the up canvas upon the yards. She was a wall-sided vessel, with a white figure-head and a square stern, and she pitched so heavily upon the swell sweeping to her bows that one could not but wonder how it would be with her when it came on to blow in earnest, with such a sea as the Atlantic in wrath threw into this rock-framed bight of coast. She rolled as regularly as she curtseyed, and gave us a view of a band of new metal sheathing that rose with a dull rusty gleam out of the water, as though to some swift vanishing touch of stormy sunlight. The white lines of her furled canvas, with the delicate interlacery of shrouds and running-gear, the fine fibres of her slender mastheads with a red spot of dog-vane at the mizzenmast—the whole body of the vessel, in a word, stood out with an exquisite clearness that made the heaving fabric resemble a choicely wrought toy upon the dark, tempestuous green which went rising and falling past her, and against the low and menacing frown of the sky beyond her.

A deeper shadow seemed to have entered the atmosphere since she let go her anchor. Away down upon her port-quarter the foam was leaping upon the black Twins and the larger rock beyond, and the round of the bay was sharply marked by the surf twisting in a wool-white curve from one point to another, but gathering a brighter whiteness as it stretched towards those extremities of the land which breasted the deeper waters and the larger swell.

The clock of St. Saviour's Church chimed five—tea-time; and as I turned to make my way home two bells were struck aboard the barque, and the light inshore wind brought in the distant tones upon the ear with a fairy daintiness of faint music that corresponded to perfection with the toy-like appearance of the vessel. One of the crew of the boat accompanied me a short distance on his way to his own humble cottage in Swim Lane.

'If that Dutchman,' said he—and by 'Dutchman' he meant Dane, for this word covers all the Scandinavian nations in Jack's language—'if that Dutchman, Mr. Tregarthen, knows what's good for him, he'll up anchor and "ratch" out afore it's too late.'

'Did you see the captain?'

'No, sir. He's in his cabin, badly laid up.'

'I thought I made out two men on top of the deck-house, who seemed in command—one the captain, and the other the mate, as I supposed.'

'No, sir; the capt'n's below. One of them two men you saw was the carpenter Damm; t'other was a boy—a passenger he looked like, though dressed as a sailor man. I didn't hear him give any orders, though his eyes seemed everywhere, and he looked to know exactly what was going forward. A likelier-looking lad I never see. Capt'n's son, I dare say.'

'Well,' said I, sending a glance above and around, 'spite of drunken old Isaac and his prediction of "airthquakes," as he calls them, it's as likely as not, to my mind, that all this gloom will end as it began—in quietude.'

The man—one of the most intelligent of our 'longshoremen—shook his head.

'The barometer don't tell lies, sir,' said he; 'the drop's been too slow and regular to signify nothing. I've known a gale o' wind to bust after taking two days to look at the ocean with his breath sucked in, as he do now. This here long quietude's the worst part, and——Smother me! Mr. Tregarthen,' said he, halting and turning his face seawards, 'if the draught that was just now blowing ain't gone!'

It was as he had said. The light breathing of air had died out, and the swell was rolling in, burnished as liquid glass.

This day-long extraordinary pause in the most menacing aspect of weather that I had ever heard of—and never in my time had I seen the like of it—seemed to communicate its own quality of breathless suspense to every living object my eye rested upon. The very dogs seemed to move with a cowed manner, as though fresh from a whipping. There was no alacrity—little movement, indeed, anywhere visible. Men hung about in small groups and conversed quietly, as though some trouble that had affected the whole community was upon them. The air trembled with the noise of the breaking surf, and there was a note in that voice, sounding as it did out of the unnatural dark hush upon sea and land, that constrained the attention to it as to something new and even alarming. A tradesman, with his apron on and without a hat, would come to his shop-door and look about him uneasily, and perhaps have a word with a customer as he entered before going round the counter and serving him. The gulls flew close inshore and screamed harshly. Here and there, framed in a darkling pane of window, you would see an old face peering at the weather and pale in the shadow.

I found my mother a good deal troubled by the appearance of the ship. She asked, with a pettishness I had seldom witnessed in her, 'What does she want? Why does she come here? Do they court destruction?'

I told her all that I had learnt about the vessel.

'There was no occasion for them to come here,' she said. 'Your dear father would have told you that the more distant a ship is upon the ocean in violent weather the safer she is; and here now come the foolish Danes to nestle among rocks, and to sneer at the advice our people give them, with the sky looking more threatening than ever I can remember it. Who could have patience with such folk?' she cried, pouring out the tea with an air of distraction and an agitated hand. 'If there were no such sailors as they at sea I am sure there would be no need for lifeboats, and brave fellows would not have to risk their lives, and perhaps leave their wives and little children to starve, to assist people whose stupidity renders them almost unfit to be rescued.'

'Why, mother,' cried I, 'this is not how you are accustomed to talk about such things.'

'I am depressed,' she answered; 'my spirits have taken their colour from the day. A most melancholy heavy day, indeed! Hark, my dear! Is not that the sound of wind?'

She looked eagerly, straining her hearing.

'Yes,' said I, 'it is the wind come at last, mother,' catching, at the instant of her speaking, the hollow groaning, in the chimney, of a sudden gust of wind flying over the housetop. 'From which quarter does it blow? I must find out!'

I ran to the house-door, and as I opened it, the wind blew with the sweep of a sudden squall right out of the darkness upon the ocean. It filled the house, and such was the weight of it that I drove the door to with difficulty. It was but a quarter before six, but the shadow of the night had entered to deepen the shadow of the storm, and it was already as dark as midnight. I went to the window and parted the curtains to take a view of the bay, but the panes of glass were made a sort of mirror of by the black atmosphere without, and when I looked they gave me back my own countenance, darkly gleaming, and the reflection of objects in the room—the lamp with its green shade upon the table, the sparkle of the silver and the china of the tea-things, and my mother's figure beyond. Yet, by peering, I managed to distinguish the speck of yellow lustre that denoted the riding light of the Danish barque—the lantern, I mean, that is hung upon a ship's fore-stay when she lies at anchor; otherwise, it was like looking down into a well. Nothing, save the flash of the near foam tumbling upon the beach right abreast of the house, was to be seen.

'Which way does the wind come, Hugh?' called my mother.

'From the westward, with a touch of south in it, too, right dead inshore. It is as I have been expecting all day.'

That night of tempest began in gusts and squalls, with lulls between, which were not a little deceptive, since they made one think that the wind was gone for good, though while the belief was growing there would come another shrieking outrush and a low roaring in the chimney, and such a shrill and doleful whistling in the casements, which there was no art in carpentry to hermetically seal against the winds of that wild, rugged western coast, as might have made one imagine the air to be filled with the ghosts of departed boatswains plying their silver pipes as they sped onwards in the race of black air.

Some while before seven o'clock it had settled into a gale, that was slowly but obstinately gathering in power, as I might know by the gradually raised notes in the humming it made, and by the ever-deepening thunder of warring billows rushing into breakers and bursting upon sand and crag. It came along in a furious play of wet, too, at times; the rain lashed the windows like small shot, and twice there was a brilliant flash of lightning that seemed spiral and crimsoned; but, if thunder followed, it was lost in the uproar of the wind. It was a night to 'stand by,' as a sailor would say; at any moment a summons might come, and, while that weather held, I knew there must be no sleep for me. It would have been all the same, indeed, barque or no barque, for this was a night to make a very hell of the waters along our line of coast; there was not another lifeboat station within twenty-five miles, and, even had the bay been empty, as I say, yet, as coxswain of the boat, I must have held myself ready for a call—ready for the notes of the bell summoning us to the rescue of a vessel that had been blown out of the sea into the bay—ready for a breathless appeal for help from some mounted messenger despatched by the coastguards miles distant to tell me that there was a ship stranded and that all hands must perish if we did not hurry to her.

My mother sat silent, with her face rendered austere by anxiety. It was about eight o'clock, when someone knocked hurriedly at the door. I ran out, being too eager to await the attendance of the servant; but, instead of some rough figure of a boatman which I had expected to see, in swept Mr. Trembath, who was carried by the violence of the wind several feet along the passage before he could bring himself up. I put my shoulder to the door, but believed I should have had to call for help to close it, so desperate was the resistance.

'What a night! What a night!' cried the clergyman. 'What is the news? You will not tell me, Tregarthen, that the ship yonder is going to hold her own against this wind and the sea that is running?'

'Pray step in,' said I. 'You are plucky to show your face to it!'

'Oh, tut!' he cried; 'it is not for a clergyman any more than for a seaman to be afraid of weather. I fear there'll be a call for you, Tregarthen. I thought I would look round—I have finished my sermon for to-morrow morning.' And thus talking in a disjointed way while he pulled off his topcoat, he entered the parlour.

After warming himself and exchanging a few sentences with my mother about the weather, he began to talk about the barque.

'Hark to that, now!' he cried, as the wind struck the front of the house with a crash that had something of the weight of a great sea in the sound of it, while you heard it in a roar of thunder overhead, charged always with an echo of pouring waters; 'what chain cables wrought by mortal skill are going to hold a vessel in the eye of all this?'

'What business have they to come here?' cried my mother.

'I met young Beckerley just now,' continued Mr. Trembath, 'and he tells me that there's some talk among our men of there having been a mutiny aboard that Dane.'

'Nothing was said to me about that,' I said.

'Beckerley was in the boat's crew that boarded her,' he went on. 'Probably he imagined a mutiny—misinterpreted a gloomy look among the Danes into an air of revolt. Anyway, nothing short of a mutiny should justify a master in anchoring in such a roadstead as this, in the face of the ugliest sky I ever saw in my life.'

'They told me the master was below, ill and helpless,' said I.

He went to the window and parted the curtains to peer through, but the wet ran down the glass, and it was like straining the gaze against a wall of ebony.

'You see,' he continued, coming back to his chair, 'the vessel has those deadly rocks right under her stern, and even if her cables don't part, it is impossible to suppose that she will not drag and be on to them in the blackness, perhaps without her people guessing at their neighbourhood until she touches—and then, God help them!'

'I suppose Pentreath,' exclaimed my mother, naming the second coxswain of the lifeboat, 'is keeping a look-out?'

'We need not doubt it,' I answered. 'As to her dragging,' said I, addressing Mr. Trembath, 'the Danes are as good sailors as the English, and understand their business; and, mutiny or no mutiny, those fellows down there are not going to take whatever may come without a shrewd guess at it, and outcry enough when it happens. They'll know fast enough if their vessel is dragging; then a flare will follow, and out we shall have to go, of course.'

'We!' said he significantly, looking from me to my mother. 'You'll not venture to-night, I hope, Tregarthen.'

'If the call comes, most certainly I shall,' said I, flushing up, but without venturing to send a glance at my mother. 'I have appointed myself captain of my men, and is it for me, of all my boat's crew, to shirk my duty in an hour of extremity? Let such a thing happen, and I vow to Heaven I could not show my face in Tintrenale again.'

Mr. Trembath seemed a little abashed.

'I respect and admire your theory of dutifulness,' said he; 'but you are not an old hand—you are no seasoned boatman in the sense I have in my mind when I think of others of your crew. Listen to this wind! It blows a hurricane, Hugh,' he exclaimed gently; 'you may have the heart of a lion, but have you the skill—the experience——' He halted, looking at my mother.

'If the call comes I will go,' said I, feeling that he reasoned only for my mother's sake, and that in secret his sympathies were with me.

'If the call comes, Hugh must go,' said my mother. 'God will shield him. He looks down upon no nobler work done in this world, none that can better merit His blessing and His countenance.'

Mr. Trembath bowed his head in a heartfelt gesture.

'Yet I hope no call will be made,' she went on. 'I am a mother——' her voice faltered, but she rallied, and said with courage and strength and dignity: 'Yes, I am Hugh's mother. I know what to expect from him, and that whatever his duty may be, he will do it.' Yet in saying this she pressed both her hands to her heart, as though the mere utterance of the words came near to breaking it.

I stepped to her side and kissed her. 'But the call has not yet come, mother,' said I. 'The vessel's anchors may hold bravely, and then, again, the long dark warning of the day will have kept the coast clear of ships.'

To this she made no reply, and I resumed my seat, gladdened to the very heart by her willingness that I should go if a summons came, albeit extorted from her love by perception of my duty; for had she been reluctant, had she refused her consent indeed, it must have been all the same. I should go whether or not, but in that case with a heavy heart, with a feeling of rebellion against her wishes that would have taken a deal of spirit out of me, and mingled a sense of disobedience with what I knew to be my duty and good in the sight of God and man.

I saw that it comforted my mother to have Mr. Trembath with her, and when he offered to go I begged him to stop and sup with us, and he consented. It was not a time when conversation would flow very easily. The noise of the gale alone was subduing enough, and to this was to be added the restlessness of expectation, the conviction in my own heart that sooner or later the call must come; and every moment that I talked—putting on as cheerful a face as I could assume—I was waiting for it. I constantly went to the window to look out, guessing that if they burnt a flare aboard the barque the torch-like flame of it would show through the weeping glass; and shortly before supper was served—that is to say, within a few minutes of nine o'clock—I left the parlour, and going to a room at the extremity of the passage, where I kept my sea-going clothes, I pulled on a pair of stout fisherman's stockings, and over them the sea-boots I always wore when I went in the lifeboat. I then brought away my monkey-jacket and oilskins and sou'-wester, and hung them in the passage ready to snatch at; for a summons to man the boat always meant hurry—there was no time for hunting; indeed, if the call found the men in bed, their custom was to dress as they ran.

Thus prepared, I returned to the parlour. Mr. Trembath ran his eye over me, but my mother apparently took no notice. A cheerful fire blazed in the grate. The table was hospitable with damask and crystal; the play of the flames set the shadows dancing upon the ceiling that lay in the gloom of the shade over the lamp. There was something in the figure of my old mother, with her white hair and black silk gown and antique gold chain about her neck, that wonderfully fitted that homely interior, warm with the hues of the coal-fire, and cheerful with pictures and with several curiosities of shield and spear, of stuffed bird and Chinese ivory ornament, gathered together by my father in the course of many voyages.

Mr. Trembath looked a plump and rosy and comfortable man as he took his seat at the table, yet there was an expression of sympathetic anxiety upon his face, and frequently I would catch him quietly hearkening, and then he would turn involuntarily to the curtained window, so that it was easy to see in what direction his thoughts went.

'One had need to build strongly in this part of the country,' said he, as we exchanged glances at the sound of a sudden driving roar of wind—a squall of wet of almost hurricane power—to which the immensely strong fabric of our house trembled as though a heavy battery of cannon were being dragged along the open road opposite, 'for, upon my word, Hugh,' said he—we were old friends, and he would as often as not give me my Christian name—'if the Dane hasn't begun to drag as yet, there should be good hope of her holding on throughout what may still be coming. Surely, for two hours now past her ground-tackle must have been very heavily tested.'

'My prayer is,' said I, 'that the wind may chop round and blow off shore. They'll have the sense to slip then, I hope, and make for the safety of wide waters, with an amidship helm.'

'He is his father's son,' said Mr. Trembath, smiling at my mother. 'An amidship helm! It is as a sailor would put it. You should have been a sailor, Tregarthen.'

My mother gently shook her head, and then for some while we ate in silence, the three of us feigning to look as though we thought of anything else rather than of the storm that was raging without, and of the barque labouring to her cables in the black heart of it.

On a sudden Mr. Trembath let fall his knife and fork.

'Hist!' he cried, half rising from his chair.

'The lifeboat bell!' I shouted, catching a note or two of the summons that came swinging along with the wind.

'Oh, Hugh!' shrieked my mother, clasping her hands.

'God keep your dear heart up!' I cried.

I sprang to her side and kissed her, wrung the outstretched hand of Mr. Trembath, and in a minute was plunging into my peacoat and oilskins. The instant I was out of the house I could hear the fast—I may say the furious—tolling of the lifeboat bell, and sending one glance at the bay, though I seemed almost blinded, and in a manner dazed by the sudden rage of the gale and its burthen of spray and rain against my face, I could distinguish the wavering, flickering yellow light of a flare-up down away in that part of the waters where the Twins and the Deadlow Rock would be terribly close at hand. But I allowed myself no time to look, beyond this hasty glance. Mr. Trembath helped me, by thrusting, to pull the house-door after me, for of my own strength I never could have done it; and then I took to my heels and drove as best I might headlong through the living wall of wind, scarcely able to fetch a breath, reeling to the terrific outflies, yet staggering on.

The gas-flames in the few lamps along the seafront were wildly dancing, their glazed frames rattled furiously, and I remember noticing, even in that moment of excitement, that one of the lamp-posts which stood a few yards away from our house had been arched by the wind as though it were a curve of leaden pipe. The two or three shops which faced the sea had their shutters up to save the windows, and the blackness of the night seemed to be rather heightened than diminished by the dim and leaping glares of the street lights. But as I neared the lifeboat house my vision was somewhat assisted by the whiteness of the foam boiling in thunder a long space out. It flung a dim, elusive, ghostly illumination of its own up on the air. I could see the outline of the boat-house against it, the shapes of men writhing, as it seemed, upon the slipway; the figure of the boat herself, which had already been eased by her own length out of the house; and I could even discern, by the aid of that wonderful light of froth, that most of or all her crew were already in her, and that they were stepping her mast, which the roof of the house would not suffer her to keep aloft when she was under shelter.

'Here's the cox'n!' shouted a voice.

'All right, men!' I roared, and with that I rushed through the door of the house, and in a bound or two gained the interior of the boat and my station on the after-grating.

CHAPTER III.

IN THE LIFEBOAT.

Now had come the moment when I should need the utmost exertion of nerve and coolness my nature was equal to. There was a large globular lamp alight in the little building—its lustre vaguely touched the boat, and helped me to see what was going on and who were present. Nevertheless I shouted:

'Are all hands aboard?'

'All hands!' came a hurricane response.

'All got your belts on?' I next cried.

'All!' was the answer—that is to say, all excepting myself, who, having worn a cork-jacket once, vowed never again to embark thus encumbered.

'Are your sails hooked on ready for hoisting?' I shouted.

'All ready, sir!'

'And your haul-off rope?'

'All ready, sir!'

'Now then, my lads—look out, all hands!'

There was a moment's pause:

'Let her go!' I roared.

A man stood close under the stern, ready to pass his knife through the lashing which held the chain to the boat.

'Stand by!' he shouted. 'All gone!'

I heard the clank of the chain as it fell, an instant after the boat was in motion—slowly at first, but in a few breaths she had gathered the full way that her own weight and the incline gave her, and rushed down the slipway, but almost noiselessly, so thickly greased was the timber structure, with some hands hoisting the foresail as she sped, and others grimly and motionless facing seawards, ready to grasp and drag upon the haul-off rope the moment the craft should be water-borne amid the smothering surf.

The thunderous slatting of the sail as the yard mounted, flinging a noise of rending upon the ear as though the cloths were whipping the hurricane in rags, the furious roaring and seething and crackling and hissing of the mountainous breakers toward which the boat was darting—the indescribable yelling of the gale sweeping past our ears as the fabric fled down the ways—the instant sight of the torn and mangled skies, which seemed dimly revealed somehow by the snowstorms of froth coursing along the bay—all this combined into an impression which, though it could not have taken longer than a second or two to produce it, dwells upon my mind with so much sharpness that the whole experience of my life might well have gone to the manufacture of it.

We touched the wash of the sea, and burst through a cloud of foam; in the beat of a heart the boat was up to our knees in water; in another she was freeing herself and leaping to the height of the next boiling acclivity, with my eight men, rigid as iron statues in their manner of hauling and in their confrontment of the sea, dragging the craft through the surf and into deep water by the haul-off rope attached to an anchor some considerable distance ahead of the end of the slipway.

At the moment of the boat smiting the first of the breakers I grasped the tiller-ropes, and on the men letting go the haul-off line I headed the craft away on the port tack, my intention being to 'reach' down in the direction of Hurricane Point, so as to be able to fetch the barque on a second board.

One had hardly the wits to notice the scene at the first going off, so headlong was the tumble upon the beach, so clamorous the rush of the tempest, and so frightfully wild the leapings and launchings of the boat amid the heavily broken surface of froth. But now she had the weight of the gale in the close-reefed lug that had been shown to it, and this steadied her; and high as the sea ran, yet as the water deepened the surge grew regular, and I was able to settle down to my job of handling the boat, the worst being over, at least so far as our outward excursion went.

I glanced shorewards and observed the blaze of a portfire, held out by a man near the boat-house to serve as a signal to the barque that help was going to her. The fire was blue, the blaze of it was brilliant, and it lighted up a wide area of the foreshore, throwing out the figures of the crowd who watched us, and the outline of the boat-house, and flinging a ghastly tint upon every tall upheaval of surf. The radiance lay in a sort of circle upon the ebony of the night, with what I have named showing in it, as though it was a picture cast by a magic-lantern upon a black curtain. You could see nothing of the lights of the town for it. On either hand of this luminous frame the houses went blending into the land, and each way all was sheer ink.

Shortly after this signal of portfire they sent up a rocket from the barque. It was a crimson ball, and it broke like a flash of lighting under the ragged rush of the sky, and then outleaped afresh the flames of a flare, or, as you might call it, a bonfire, from the deck of the vessel—a burning tar-barrel, perhaps; and the light of it disclosed the vision of the ship plunging awfully, again and again veiled by storms of crystal which the fathom-high flames of the flare flashed into prisms.

One of our men roared out with an oath: 'She'll have taken the Twins afore we get to her!' and another bellowed: 'Why did they wait to drag a mile afore they signalled?' But no more was said just then.

Indeed, a man needed to exert the whole strength of his lungs to make himself heard. The edge of the wind seemed to clip the loudest shout as it left the lips, as you would sever a rope with a knife.

Our boat was small for a craft of her character, but a noble, brave, nimble fabric, as had been again and again proved; and every man of us, allowing that good usage was given her, had such confidence in the Janet, that we would not have exchanged her for the largest, handsomest, and best-tested boat on the coast of the United Kingdom. You would have understood her merits had you been with us on this night. I was at the yoke-lines; Pentreath, my second in command, sat with his foot against the side, gripping the foresheet, ready to let go in an instant; the mizzen had been hoisted, and the rest of the men, crouching down upon the thwarts, sat staring ahead, with iron countenances, with never so much as a stoop among them to the hardest wash of the surge that might sweep with a wild hissing shriek athwart their sea-helmets and half fill the boat as it came bursting in smoke over the weather-bow, till, for the space of a wink or two, the black gale was as white as a snowstorm overhead.

As we 'reached' out the sea grew weightier. Never before had I known a greater sea in that bay. The ridges seemed to stand up to twice the height of our masts; every peak boiled, and as we rose to the summit of it, the boat was smothered in the foam of her own churning, and in the headlong, giddy, dazzling rush into which she soared, with the whole weight of the gale in her fragment of lug bowing her over and sending her, as you might have believed, gunwale under down the long, indigo slant of the under-running billow.

We held on, all as mute as death in the boat. From time to time as we rose to the head of a sea I would take a look in the direction of the barque, and catch a glimpse of the windy spark of her flare, or of the meteoric sailing of a rocket over her mastheads. There should have been a moon, but the planet was without power to strike the faintest illumination into the heaps and rags of vapours which were pouring up like smoke over the edge of the raging Atlantic horizon. The picture of the parlour I had just left would sometimes arise before me: I figured my mother peering out at the black and throbbing scene of bay; I imagined good Mr. Trembath at her side, uttering such words of comfort and of hope as occurred to him; but such fancies as these seemed to be beaten away by the breath of the hurricane, as rapidly as they were formed. Should we be in time? If the vessel's cables parted she was doomed. Nay; if she should continue to drag another quarter of an hour, she would be on to the Twins, and go to pieces as a child's house of bricks falls to the touch of a hand!

'Ready about!' I roared.

The helm was put down, the foresheet eased off, and round came the boat nobly on the very pinnacle of a surge, pausing a moment as she was there poised, and then plunging into the hollow to rise again with her foresail full, and heading some points to windward of the vessel we were now steering for.

Through it we stormed, sea after sea bursting from the lifeboat's bow in pallid clouds which the wind sent whirling in shrieks—so articulate was the sound of the slinging spray—into the blackness landwards. Here and there a tiny spark of lamp flickering in the thick of the gloom told us the situation of Tintrenale; but there was nothing more to be seen that way; the land and the sky above it met in a deep, impenetrable dye, towards which, to leeward of us, the tall seas went flashing in long yearning coils, throbbing into mere pallidness when a cable's length distant.

They had kindled another flare aboard the barque, or else had plied the old one with fresh fuel: she was visible by the light of the flames, the white of her furled canvas coming and going to the fluctuating fires; and I marked, with a heart that sank in me, the dreadful manner of her labouring. She was pitching bows under, and rolling too, and by the shining of the signal-fire upon her deck offered a most wonderful sight, rendered terrible also by a view that we could now get of a crowd of men hanging in a lump in her starboard fore-rigging.

The second coxswain flashed a portfire that they might know the lifeboat was at hand, and we went plunging and sweeping down to a point some little distance ahead of the barque, the crowd of us irradiated by the stream of emerald-green flame.

'All ready with the anchor, lads?' I shouted.

'All ready, sir!' was the answer.

'Down foresail!' and as I gave this order I put the helm down and brought the boathead to wind about thirty fathoms ahead of the ship.

'Let go the anchor!'

'Unstep the foremast!' bawled the second coxswain, and, while this was doing, he and another swiftly lifted the mizzenmast out of its bearings and laid it along.

'Veer away cable handsomely!' I shouted; and pitching and foaming, now dropping into a hollow that seemed fifty feet deep, now appearing to scale a surge that lifted the boat's bow almost dead on end over her stern—all in a fashion to make the brain of the stoutest and most experienced among us reel again—we dropped alongside.

In what followed there was so much confusion, so much uproar, such distraction of shouts in foreign and unintelligible accents, such a terrible washing of seas, such bewilderment born of the darkness, of the complicated demands upon the attention through need of keeping the boat clear of the huge chopping bows of the barque, through bawling to the men in the rigging and receiving answers which we could not understand, that this passage of my singular adventure could scarcely be less vague to me in memory if, instead of having been an actor in it, I had read it in a book.

There were six or seven men, as well as I could make out, clustered in the fore-rigging. I believed I could see others in the mizzen-shrouds. This being my notion, my consuming anxiety was to drop the boat down on the quarter as quickly as possible, for it was not only that the Twins were within a cable's range astern, with the fury of the foam there making a kind of shining upon the water that might have passed for moonlight: such was the volume and height of the sea roaring betwixt the labouring ship and our boat, that at every toss of the little fabric, at every ponderous lean down of the great groaning black hull towering over us, we stood to be staved.

The fellows in the fore-ringing seemed to be stupefied. We all of us yelled, 'Jump, jump! Watch as she rises, and jump for God's sake!' meanwhile keeping a turn of the cable so as to hold the boat abreast of them. It seemed an eternity before they understood, and yet a minute had not passed since we dropped down, when a cry broke from them, and first one jumped, and then another, and then the rest of them sprang, and there they were lying in a huddle in the bottom of the boat, one or two of them groaning dreadfully, as though from broken limbs, or worse injuries still, all of them motionless as they lay when they jumped, like folk nearly dead of terror and cold and pain.

'Veer out now, my lads! veer out!' I cried; 'handsomely, that we may get smartly under the mizzen-shrouds.'

'There's nobody there, sir,' roared one of my men.

No! I looked and found it had been an illusion of my sight, due to the flame of the flare that was burning fiercely on the main-deck.

'Are you all here?' I cried, addressing the dusky huddle of men at the bottom of the boat.

Something was said, but the gale deafened me, and I could catch no meaning, no syllables indeed, in the answer.

'They'll all be here, sir,' shouted one of my crew; 'the port-davits are empty, and some'll have left in the boat.'

A great sea swung us up at that instant flush with the level of the bulwark-rails, with a heel of the barque that disclosed her decks bare to the bright fires of the signal.

'They must be all here!' I cried; 'but look well. Is there one among you who can catch any signs of a living man on board?'

They waited for the next upheaval of sea; then rose a shout: 'They're all here, sir, you'll find.'

'Heave ahead then, my lads!' by which I meant that they should haul upon the cable to drag the boat clear of the dreadful crushing, shearing chop of the overhanging bows of the barque.

At that instant a head showed over the rail a little abaft the fore-shrouds, and the clear, piercing voice of a boy cried, with as good an English accent as I myself have, 'My father is ill and helpless in the cabin. Do not leave us!'

'No, no, we'll not leave you,' I instantly shouted in return, sending my voice fair to the lad from the height of a sea that pretty well brought his and my head on a level. 'How many are there of you?'

'Two,' was the answer.

I had to wait for the boat to slide up to the summit of the next surge ere I could call out again. The black yawns betwixt us and the barque might have passed for valleys looked at from a hillside, so horribly hollow and deep were they; they were pale and yet dusky too, with sheets of foam; a soul-confounding noise of thunderous washing and seething rose up from them. When we were in one of those hollows the great mass of the dark fabric of the barque seemed to tower fifty feet above us, and we lay becalmed, hanging, while you might have counted five, in absolute stagnation, with the yell of the wind sweeping over our heads as though we were in the heart of a pit.

'Cannot your father help himself at all?' I bawled to the boy.

'He cannot stir; he must be lifted!' he answered in a shriek, for his high, clear, piercing cry thus sounded.

'By Heaven, then, lads,' I bawled to my men, 'there's no time to be lost! We must bundle the poor fellow over somehow, and help the lad. Nothing will have been done if we leave them behind us. Watch your chance and follow me, three of you!'

At the instant of saying this I made a spring from off the height of the gratings on which I stood, and got into the fore-chains, the boat then being on the level of that platform; and as actively as a cat, for few young fellows had nimbler limbs, I scrambled over the bulwark on to the deck, just in time to escape a huge fold of rushing water that foamed sheer through the chains with a spite and weight that must instantly have settled my business for me.

I was in the act of running along the deck to where the lad stood—that is to say, a little forward of the gangway, not doubting that the others of my crew whom I had called upon were following with as much alertness as I had exhibited, when I felt a shock as of a thump pass through the barque.

'She has struck!' thought I.

But hardly was I sensible of this tremor through the vessel, when there arose a wild and dreadful cry from alongside—heavenly God! how am I to describe that shocking noise of human distress? I fled to the rail and looked over; it was all boiling water under me, with just a sight of the black line of the gunwale or of the keel of the lifeboat; but there was such a raging of foam, such a thickness of seething yeast smoking into the hurricane as though some volcanic eruption had happened right under the barque, filling the air with steam, that there was nothing whatever to be seen saving just that dark glance of keel or gunwale, as I have said, which, however, vanished as I looked in the depth of the hissing spumy smother. I knew by this that the lifeboat must have been staved and filled by a sudden fling of her against the massive sides of the barque; for she was a self-righting craft, and, though she might have thrown every soul in her out as she rolled over, yet she would have rose buoyant again, emptying herself as she leapt to the surge, and there she would have been alongside, without a living creature in her if you will, but a good boat, and riding stoutly to her cable. But she had been stove, and now she was gone!

The blazing tar-barrel on the main-deck enabled me to see my way to rush aft. I cried to the lad as I sped: 'The boat is staved; all hands of her are overboard and drowning! Heave ropes' ends over the side! fling life-buoys!' And thus shouting, scarcely knowing, indeed, what I called out, so confounded was I, so shocked, so horrified, so heartbroken, I may say, by the suddenness and the fearfulness of this disaster, I reached the quarter of the barque and overhung it; but I could see nothing. The cloudy boiling rose and fell, and with every mighty drop of the great square counter of the barque, the sea swept in a roar from either hand of her with a cataractal fury that would rush whatever was afloat in it dozens of fathoms distant at every scend. Here and there now I believe I could distinguish some small black object, but the nearer pallid waters dimmed into a blackness at a little distance, and, if those dark points which I observed were the heads of swimmers, then such was the headlong race of the surge they were swept into the throbbing dusk ere I could make sure of them.

I stood as one paralyzed from head to foot. My inability to be of the least service to my poor comrades and the unhappy Danes caused me to feel as though the very heart in me had ceased to beat. The young fellow came to my side.

'What is to be done?' he cried.

'Nothing!' I answered in a passion of grief. 'What can be done? God grant that many of them will reach the shore! The hurl of the sea is landwards, and their life-belts will float them. But your people are doomed.'

'And so are we!' he exclaimed shrilly, yet without perceptible terror, with nothing worse than wild excitement in his accents. 'There are rocks directly under our stern. Are you a sailor?'

'No!'

'O, du gode Gud! what is to be done?' cried the lad.

I cast my eyes despairingly around. The tar-barrel was still burning bravely upon the deck, defying the ceaseless sweeping of spray from over the bows; the windy unearthly light tinctured the ship with its sickly sallow hue to the height of her lower yards, and the whole ghastly body of her was to be seen as she rolled and plunged under a sky that was the blacker for the light of the distress-flare, and upon a sea whose vast spreads of creaming brows would again and again come charging along to the very height of the bulwark rail.

In the midst of this pause on my part, and while every instinct of self-preservation in me was blindly flinging itself, so to speak, against the black and horrible situation that imprisoned me, and while I was hopelessly endeavouring to consider what was to be done to save the young fellow alongside of me from destruction—for, as to his father, it was impossible to extend my sympathies at such a moment to one whom I had not seen, who did not appeal to me, as it were, in form and voice for succour—I say, in the midst of this pause of hopeless deliberation, the roar of the hurricane ceased on a sudden. Nothing more, I was sure, was signified by this than a lull, to be followed by some fierce chop round, or by the continuance of the westerly tempest with a bitterer spite in the renewed rush of it. The lull may have lasted ten or fifteen seconds. In that time I do not know that there was a breath of air to be felt outside the violent eddyings and draughts occasioned by the sickening motions of the barque. I looked up at the sky, and spied the leanest phantom of a star that glimmered for the space of a single swing of a pendulum, and then vanished behind a rushing roll of vapour of a midnight hue, winging with incredible velocity from the land.

So insupportable was the movement of the deck that I was forced to support myself by a belaying-pin, or I must have been thrown. My companion clung to a similar pin close beside me. The thunder of running and colliding waters rose into that magical hush of tempest; I could hear the booming of the surf as far as Hurricane Point and the caldron-like noises of the waters round about the rocks astern of us.

'Has the storm ceased?' cried my companion. 'Oh, beloved father, we may be spared yet!' he added, extending his disengaged hand towards the deck-house, as he apostrophized the helpless man who lay there.

Amazed as I was by this instant cessation of the gale, I could yet find mind enough to be struck by my companion's manner, by his words, and now, I may say, by his voice also. I was about to address him; but, as my lips parted, there was a vivid flash of lightning that threw out the whole scene of bay, cliff, foreshore, and town, with the line of the horizon seawards, in a dazzle of violet; a crash of thunder followed; but, before its ear-splitting reverberation had ceased, the echoes of it were drowned in the bellowing of the gale coming directly off the land.

What is there in words to express the fury of this outfly? It met the heave of the landward-running seas, and swept them into smoke, and the air grew as white and thick with spume as though a heavy snowstorm were blowing horizontally along. It took the barque and swung her; her labouring was so prodigious as she was thrust by this fresh hurricane broadside round to the surge, that I imagined every second she would founder under my feet. I felt a shock: my companion cried, 'One of the cables has parted!' A moment later I felt the same indescribable tremble running through the planks on which we stood.

'Is that the other cable gone, do you think?' I shouted.

'There is a lead-line over the side,' he cried; 'it will tell us if we are adrift.'

I followed him to near the mizzen rigging; neither of us durst let go with one hand until we had a grip of something else with the other; it was now not only the weight of the wind that would have laid us prone and pinned us to the deck—a pyramidal sea had sprung up as though by enchantment, and each apex as it soared about the bows and sides was blown inboards in very avalanches of water, which with each violent roll of the vessel poured in a solid body to the rail, one side or the other, again and again, to the height of our waist.

My companion extended his hand over the bulwarks, and cried out: 'Here is the lead-line. It stretches towards the bows. Oh, sir, we are adrift! we are blowing out to sea!'

I put my hand over and grasped the line, and instantly knew by the angle of it that the lad was right. By no other means would he have been able to get at the truth. The weight of lead, by resting on the bottom, immediately told if the barque was dragging. All around was white water; the blackness of the night drooped to the very spit of the brine; not a light was to be perceived, not the vaguest outline of the cliff; and the whole scene of darkness was the more bewildering for the throb of the near yeast upon the eyesight.

'Is your binnacle-light burning?' I cried.

The lad answered, 'Yes.'

'Then,' I shouted, 'we must find out the quarter the gale has shifted into and get her stern on to it, and clear Hurricane Point, if Almighty God will permit. There may be safety in the open; there is none here.'

With the utmost labour and distress we made our way aft. The flare had been extinguished by the heavy falls of water, and it was worse than walking blindfolded. The binnacle-light was burning—this was, indeed, to be expected. The barque was plunging directly head to wind, and a glance at the card enabled me to know that the gale was blowing almost due east, having shifted, as these cyclonic ragings often do, right into the quarter opposite whence it had come.

'We must endeavour to get her before it,' I cried; 'but I am no sailor. There may come another shift, and we ought to clear the land while the hurricane holds as it does. What is to be done?'

'Will she pay off if the helm is put hard over?' he answered. 'Let us try it!'

He seized the spokes on one side; I put my shoulder to the wheel on the other, and thus we jammed and secured the helm into the posture called by sailors 'hard a-starboard.' She fell off, indeed—into the trough, and there she lay, amid such a diabolical play of water, such lashings of seas on both sides, as it is not in mortal pen to portray!

Had we been in the open ocean, a better attitude than the barque herself had taken up we could not have wished for. She was, indeed, 'hove-to,' as the sea-expression is, giving something of her bow to the wind, and was in that posture which the shipmaster will put his vessel into in such a tempest as was now blowing. But, unhappily, the land was on either hand of us, and though our drift might be straight out to sea, I could not be sure that it was. The tide would be making to the west and north; the coils and pyramids and leapings of surge had also a sort of yearning and leaning towards north-west, as if in sympathy with the tide; the deadly terrace of Hurricane Point lay that way; and so the leaving of the barque in the trough of the sea might come, indeed, to cost us our lives, which had only just been spared by the shift in the storm of wind.

'She does not answer the helm,' I cried to my young companion.

'Her head will pay off,' he answered, 'if we can manage to hoist a fragment of sail forward. It must be done, sir. Will you help me?'

'God knows I will do anything!' I cried. 'Show me what is to be done. We must save our lives if we can. There may be a chance out on the ocean for us.'

Without another word he went forward, and I followed him. We had to pause often to preserve ourselves from being floated off our feet. The flood, which washed white betwixt the rails, lifted the rigging off the pins, and sent the ropes snaking about the decks, and our movements were as much hampered as though we fought our way through a jungle. The foam all about us, outside and inboards, put a wild, cold glimmer into the air, which enabled us to distinguish outlines. In fact, at moments the whole shape of the barque, from her bulwarks to some distance up her masts, would show like a sketch in ink upon white paper as she leaned off the slant of the sea and painted her figure upon the hill of froth thundering away from her on the lee-side.

My companion paused for a moment or two under the shelter of the caboose or galley, to tell me what he meant to do. We then crawled on to the forecastle, and he bade me hold by a rope which he put into my hand, and await his return. I watched him creep into the 'eyes' of the vessel and get upon the bowsprit, but after that I lost sight of him, for the seas smoked so fiercely all about the ship's head—to every plunge of her bows there rose so shrouding a thickness of foam—that the air was a fog of crystals where the lad was, and had he gone overboard he could not have vanished more utterly from my sight. Indeed, I could not tell whether he was gone or not, and a feeling of horror possessed me when I thought of being left alone in the vessel with a sick and useless man lying somewhere aft, and with the rage and darkness of the dreadful storm around me, the chance of striking upon Hurricane Point, and no better hope at the best than what was to be got out of thinking of the midnight breast of the storming Atlantic.

After a few minutes there was the noise of the rattling of canvas resembling a volley of small shot fired off the bows. The figure of the lad came from the bowsprit out of a burst of spray that soared in steam into the wind.

'Only a fragment must be hoisted!' he exclaimed with his mouth at my ear. 'Pull with me!'

I put my weight upon the rope, and together we rose a few feet of the sail upon the stay—it was the foretopmast staysail, as I afterwards discovered.

'Enough!' cried my companion in his clear, penetrating voice; 'if it will but hold till the vessel pays off, all will be well. We dare not ask for more.'

He secured the rope we had dragged upon to a pin, and I followed him aft, finding leisure even in that time of distress and horror to wonder at the coolness, the intrepidity of soul, that was expressed in his clear unfaltering speech, in the keen judgment and instant resolution of a lad whose age, as I might gather from his voice, could scarcely exceed fifteen or sixteen years. Between us we seized the wheel afresh, one on either side of it, and waited. But we were not to be kept long in suspense. Indeed, even before we had grasped the helm, the barque was paying off. The rag of canvas held nobly, and to the impulse of it the big bows of the vessel rounded away from the gale, and in a few minutes she was dead before it, pitching furiously, with the sea snapping and foaming to her taffrail and quarters.

But the thickness of her yards, with the canvas rolled up on them, the thickness of the masts, too, the spread of the tops, the complicated gear of shroud, backstay, and running rigging—all offered resistance enough to the dark and living gale that was bellowing right over the stern to put something of the speed of an arrow into the keel of the fabric. Through it she madly raced, with pallid clouds blowing about her bows, and white peaks hissing along her sides, and a wake of snow under her counter heaving to half the height of the mizzenmast with the hurl of the seas, and a ceaseless blowing of froth over our heads as the lad and I stood together grasping the wheel, steering the vessel into the darkness of the great Atlantic Ocean, with our eyes upon the compass-card, whose illuminated disc showed the course on which we were being flashed forwards by the storm to be a trifle south of west.

CHAPTER IV.

HELGA NIELSEN.

For full twenty minutes the lad and I clung to the helm without exchanging a word. The speed of the driven vessel rendered her motion comparatively easy, after the intolerable lurching and rolling and plunging of her as she lay at anchor or in the trough. She was swept onwards with such velocity that I had little or no fear of her taking in the seas over her stern, and she steered well, with but little wildness in the swerving of her bows, as was to be seen by the comparative regularity of the oscillation of the compass-card.

This running before the tempest, of course, diminished the volume and power of it, so far, I mean, as our own sensations were concerned; but the sight of the sea, as much of it at least as was visible, coupled with the thunder of the wind up aloft in the sky, and the prodigious crying and shrieking and shrilling of it in the rigging, was warrant enough that were we to heave the barque to we should find the hurricane harder now than it had been at any other time since it first came on to blow. Yet our racing before it, as I have said, seemed somewhat to lull it, and we could converse without having to cry out, though for twenty minutes we stood mute as statues waiting and watching.

At last my companion said to me: 'Have we passed that point which you spoke of, do you think?'

'Oh yes,' I answered. 'It would not be above two miles distant from the point where we broke adrift. Our speed cannot have been less than eight or nine knots. I should say Hurricane Point is a full mile away down on the quarter there.'

'I fear that we shall find the sea,' said he, 'grow terribly heavy as we advance.'

'Yes,' said I; 'but what is to be done? There is nothing for it but to advance. Suppose such another shift of wind as has just happened—what then? We should have a line of deadly shore right under our lee. No, we must hold on as we are.'

'There are but two of us!' cried he: 'my father cannot count. What are we to do? We cannot work this big ship!'

'The weather may break,' said I; 'it is surely too fierce to last. What can we hope for but to be rescued or assisted by some passing vessel? Is this ship stanch?'

'Yes; she is a strong ship,' he replied. 'She is about six years old. My father is her owner. I wish I could go to him,' he added; 'he will be dying to learn what has happened and what is being done, and it is past the time for his medicine, and he will be wanting his supper!'

I tried to catch a view of him as he spoke these words, but the haze of the binnacle-lamp did not reach to his face, and it was as black as the face of the sky itself out of that sheen. What he had said had a girlish note in it that I could not reconcile with his dress, with his seafaring alertness, with his spirited behaviour, his nimble crawling out upon the bowsprit, and his perception of what was to be done, under conditions which might well have clouded the wits of the oldest and most audacious sailor.

'Pray go and see your father,' said I. 'I believe I can keep this helm amidships without help.' And, indeed, if I could not have steered the barque alone, I do not know that such assistance as he could offer would have suffered me to control her. He seemed but a slender lad—so far, at least, as I had been able to judge from the view I got when the flare was burning—very quick, but without such strength as I should have looked for in a young seaman, as I could tell whenever the wheel had to be put up or down.

He let go the spokes, and stood apart for a minute or two, as though to judge whether I could manage without him; then said he, 'I will return quickly,' and with that he took a step and vanished in the blackness forward of the binnacle-stand.

My mind dwelt for a moment upon him, upon the clearness and purity of his voice, upon a something in his speech which I could not define, and which puzzled me; upon his words, which were as good English as one could hope to hear at home, albeit there was a certain sharpness and incisiveness—perhaps I might say a little of harshness—in his accentuation that might suggest him a foreigner to an English ear, though, as I then supposed, it was more likely than not this quality arose from the excitement and dismay and distress which worked in him as in me.

But he speedily ceased to engage my thoughts. What could I dwell upon but the situation in which I found myself—the spectacle of the black outline of barque painting herself upon the volumes of white water she hove up around her as she rushed forward pitching bows under, her rigging echoing with unearthly cries, as if the dark waving mass of spar and gear aloft were crowded with tormented souls wailing and howling and shrieking dismally? I recalled my mother's dream; I believed I was acting in some dreadful nightmare of my own slumbers; all had happened so suddenly—so much of emotion, of wild excitement, of agitation, and, I may say, horror, had been packed into the slender space of time between the capsizal of the lifeboat and this rushing out of the bay, that, now I had a little leisure to bend my mind to contemplation of the reality, I could not believe in it as an actual thing. I was dazed; my hearing was stunned by the ceaseless roar of wind and seas. The Janet stove and sunk! All my lion-hearted men drowned, perhaps! The poor Danes, for whom they had forfeited their lives, long ago corpses! Would not this break my mother's heart? Would there be a survivor to tell her that when I was last seen I was aboard the barque? Once again I figured the little parlour I had quitted but a few hours since—I pictured my mother sitting by the fire, waiting and listening—the long night, the bitter anguish of suspense!—it was lucky for me that the obligation of having to watch and steer the vessel served as a constant intrusion upon my mind at this time, for could I have been able to sit down and surrender myself wholly to my mood, God best knows how it must have gone with me.

The lad was about ten minutes absent. I found him alongside the wheel without having witnessed his approach. He came out of the darkness as a spirit might shape itself, and I did not know that he was near me until he spoke.

'My father says that our safety lies in heading into the open sea, to obtain what you call a wide offing,' said he.

'What does he advise?' I asked.

'"We must continue to run," he says,' answered the lad, meaning by run that we should keep the barque before the wind. '"When the coast is far astern we must endeavour to heave to." So he counsels. I told him we are but two. He answered, "It may be done."'

'I wish he were able to leave his cabin and take charge,' said I. 'What is his complaint?'

'He was seized, shortly after leaving Cuxhaven, with rheumatism in the knees,' he answered; 'he cannot stand—cannot, indeed, stir either leg.'

'Why did he not get himself conveyed ashore for treatment?'