shed to the fore.

"'In the night, I suddenly saw the lights of a town. It was Galveston,
and we were drivin' right on for it. I was so glad that I sang and
shouted. At last, at last we were goin' to be wrecked. Then, perhaps,
there would be rest, unless indeed I were already dead and pumpin'
forever. We drove on and on, while I shouted--and went on pumpin'.

"'A sea picked us up and threw us at the sea-wall, the seventeen foot
high sea-wall. Just before we struck, I saw the Captain move and look
up. The schooner was thrown out of the water, as a porpoise jumps,
vaulted the sea-wall and came to solid ground with a crash that broke
every timber. We landed stern first, and the wave that followed us tore
off our bow and foredeck and threw them clear over the vessel. The
foredeck was found, after the storm, a hundred yards southeast of the
maindeck. The bow was found eight blocks away, in the centre of the
business district of the city.

"'We stopped pumpin'. There weren't any pumps any more. Of the seven of
us, five were unconscious when a rescuin' party reached us, through the
hurricane, four hours later. Two of us were crippled for life, and it
was many a long day before Bill was free from the madness which had
begun with the crack on the head when the wheel was swept away.

"'Daylight of Tuesday found me in bed, with an army surgeon
straightenin' out my broken bones. The hurricane still raged over
Galveston. We had been derelict for two days and a half, at the pumps
for fifty-seven hours, without food or water for forty hours, yet not a
man was lost. No other dismasted vessel has ever lived through the eye
of a hurricane and been tossed over a sea-wall into the business streets
of a city. Yet seven of us, all Americans, still live to tell the
tale.'"

The young observer paused and looked at the boys. They were all very
still.

"And the beach," the young observer continued, "that once white beach
with its stretches of sand, what did that look like, beyond the
engineers' parade ground, where the wrecked schooner lay? Mis-shapen,
distorted, blotched, drabbled and crimsoned, it spread away to the
horizons, east and west, its scars showing under the rays of the sun
which shone out from the mares' tails of the departing hurricane. Part
of it had disappeared under the waters, now rapidly subsiding. The
great causeway was a mass of ruins, but the sea-wall, the two-million
dollar sea-wall, stood with its front to the ocea