and on the
tables and benches in the saloon it had been possible to keep
comparatively dry. As night fell the tide rose, and at midnight the
water came rushing over the deck in huge volumes, filling the saloon,
and making the cabins floating coffins. The women were ordered up and
instructed to take to the rigging, but many of them, cowed by the
wildness of the sea that now swept the deck fore and aft, and shuddering
before the fury of the pitiless, sleet-laden gale, refused to leave the
saloon.

Then happened horrible scenes which the pen refuses to portray in their
fulness. One woman, driven mad with fear and despair, deliberately hung
herself from the roof of the saloon. A man, taking out his penknife, dug
it into his wrist and worked it about as long as he had strength, dying
where he fell. Another, incoherently calling on the wife and child he
had left in Germany, rushed about with a bottle in his hand frantically
shouting for paper and pencil. Somebody gave him both, and, scribbling a
note, he corked it down in a bottle and threw it overboard, following it
himself a moment later as a great wave came and swept him out of sight.

There were five nuns on board who, by their terror-stricken conduct,
seem to have added greatly to the weirdness of the scene. They were deaf
to all entreaties to leave the saloon, and when, almost by main force,
the stewardess (whose conduct throughout was plucky) managed to get them
on to the companion-ladder, they sank down on the steps and stubbornly
refused to go another step. They seemed to have returned to the saloon
again shortly, for somewhere in the dead of the night, when the greater
part of the crew and passengers were in the rigging, one was seen with
her body half through the skylight, crying aloud in a voice heard above
the storm, "Oh, my God, make it quick! make it quick!" At daylight, when
the tide had ebbed, leaving the deck clear, some one from the rigging
went down, and, looking into the cabin, saw the nuns floating about face
upwards, all dead.

There seems to have been a wonderful amount of unselfishness displayed,
everybody cheering and trying to help every other body. One of the
passengers--a cheery Teuton, named Adolph Herrmann--took a young
American lady under his special charge. He helped her up the rigging
and held her on there all through the night, and says she was as
brave and as self-possessed as if they had been comfortably on shore.
Some time during the n