a son's natural wish and present him with a real
rowboat.... Out of the corners of our eyes we watched the water creeping
around the gunwale, and the very muddiness of it seemed to enhance its
coldness, to make the horrors of its depths more mysterious and hideous.
The voice of Grits startled us.

"O Gawd," he was saying, "we're a-going to sink, and I carn't swim! The
blarsted tar's give way back here."

"Is she leaking?" I cried.

"She's a-filling up like a bath tub," he lamented.

Slowly but perceptibly, in truth, the bow was rising, and above the
whistling of the wind I could hear his chattering as she settled....
Then several things happened simultaneously: an agonized cry behind me,
distant shouts from the shore, a sudden upward lunge of the bow, and
the torture of being submerged, inch by inch, in the icy, yellow water.
Despite the splashing behind me, I sat as though paralyzed until I was
waist deep and the boards turned under me, and then, with a spasmodic
contraction of my whole being I struck out--only to find my feet on the
muddy bottom. Such was the inglorious end of the good ship Petrel! For
she went down, with all hands, in little more than half a fathom of
water.... It was not until then I realized that we had been blown clear
across the pond!

Figures were running along the shore. And as Tom and I emerged dragging
Grits between us,--for he might have been drowned there abjectly in the
shallows,--we were met by a stout and bare-armed Irishwoman whose scanty
hair, I remember, was drawn into a tight knot behind her head; and who
seized us, all three, as though we were a bunch of carrots.

"Come along wid ye!" she cried.

Shivering, we followed her up the hill, the spectators of the tragedy,
who by this time had come around the pond, trailing after. Nancy was not
among them. Inside the shanty into which we were thrust were two small
children crawling about the floor, and the place was filled with steam
from a wash-tub against the wall and a boiler on the stove. With a
vigorous injunction to make themselves scarce, the Irishwoman slammed
the door in the faces of the curious and ordered us to remove our
clothes. Grits was put to bed in a corner, while Tom and I, provided
with various garments, huddled over the stove. There fell to my lot the
red flannel shirt which I had seen on the clothes-line. She gave us
hot coffee, and was back at her wash-tub in no time at all, her entire
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