and I saw in the darkness white
lines appearing and disappearing, lines of foam, while each wave struck
the Marie Joseph and shook her with a short quiver which went to our
hearts.

"The English girl was trembling. I felt her shiver against me. And I had
a wild desire to take her in my arms.

"Down there, before and behind us, to the left and right, lighthouses
were shining along the shore--lighthouses white, yellow and red,
revolving like the enormous eyes of giants who were watching us, waiting
eagerly for us to disappear. One of them in especial irritated me. It
went out every thirty seconds and it lit up again immediately. It was
indeed an eye, that one, with its lid incessantly lowered over its fiery
glance.

"From time to time the Englishman struck a match to see the hour; then he
put his watch back in his pocket. Suddenly he said to me, over the heads
of his daughters, with tremendous gravity:

"'I wish you a happy New Year, Mosieu.'

"It was midnight. I held out my hand, which he pressed. Then he said
something in English, and suddenly he and his daughters began to sing
'God Save the Queen,' which rose through the black and silent air and
vanished into space.

"At first I felt a desire to laugh; then I was seized by a powerful,
strange emotion.

"It was something sinister and superb, this chant of the shipwrecked, the
condemned, something like a prayer and also like something grander,
something comparable to the ancient 'Ave Caesar morituri te salutant.'

"When they had finished I asked my neighbor to sing a ballad alone,
anything she liked, to make us forget our terrors. She consented, and
immediately her clear young voice rang out into the night. She sang
something which was doubtless sad, because the notes were long drawn out
and hovered, like wounded birds, above the waves.

"The sea was rising now and beating upon our wreck. As for me, I thought
only of that voice. And I thought also of the sirens. If a ship had
passed near by us what would the sailors have said? My troubled spirit
lost itself in the dream! A siren! Was she not really a siren, this
daughter of the sea, who had kept me on this worm-eaten ship and who was
soon about to go down with me deep into the waters?

"But suddenly we were all five rolling on the deck, because the Marie
Joseph had sunk on her right side. The English girl had fallen upon me,
and before I knew what I was doing, thinking that my last moment was
come, I had ca