od! here comes the
lifeboat!' Not too soon was she! For the hungry breakers were roaring
under their lee. Blue lights and other signals of distress had already
been made on board the vessel for some time; a rocket too had been
fired, with a rather unsatisfactory result.

One of the mates, who I was informed hailed from County Cork, decided
to fire a rocket, a thing he had never, it seems, done before in his
life, and failing the usual rocket-stand, he bethought him of the novel
and ingenious expedient of letting it off through the iron tube which
formed the chimney of the galley or cooking-house on deck, thus hoping
to make sure of successfully directing its flight upwards. In the
confusion and darkness he did in his execution not perhaps do justice
to himself, or to the fertility of resource which had devised so
excellent a plan. The sea was rolling to the depth of two feet over
the deck, and washing right through the galley house, and it was only
by great efforts he succeeded in the darkness in fastening the rocket
in the tube which formed the chimney.

To do this he had unwisely removed the rocket from its stick, and,
unfortunately, he fastened it in the chimney upside down. Having done
so, he fumbled in his pocket, the darkness being intense, for his
matches, and applied the light underneath in the usual place. But the
rocket being upside down he of course failed to set it off, and then he
unluckily tried the other end, which was uppermost, with the disastrous
result, as my English informant described it, that 'the hexplosion
blowed him clean out of the galley.'

'Blowed him!' said I, unconsciously adopting my friend's expression,
'where?'

'Why,' said he, 'hout of the galley into the lee scuppers.'

'Was the poor fellow much hurt?'

'Hurt! Bless you! not he. But he kept shouting like forty blue
murders!'

'What did he say?'

'Well,' he replied, 'he was that scared and that choked with soot, as
ever was, that all he could say was--I'm dead! I'm dead! I'm dead!'

The position of the vessel was now very serious; she was going so fast
astern towards the breakers and the land that after the lifeboat
anchored ahead of and close to her she could hardly keep abreast of the
dragging vessel by paying out her cable as fast as possible. Roberts
and Adams, and in all five of the lifeboatmen, sprang on board of her
as she rolled in the pitchy night.

They sprang, as the lifeboat went up and the ship came