im too busy to talk. There was the heavy swell to watch,
and the tall, slowly-rolling metal fabric ahead of us to sheer
alongside of. For my part, I could not see how Grace was to get
aboard, and, observing no ladder over the side as we rounded under the
vessel's stern, I asked the second mate how we were to manage it.

"Oh," said he, "we shall send you both up in a chair with a whip.
There's the block," he added, pointing to the yard-arm, "and the line's
already rove, you'll observe."

There were some seventy or eighty people watching us as we drew
alongside, all staring over the rail and from the forecastle and from
the poop, as one man. I remarked a few bonnets and shawled heads
forward, and two or three well-dressed women aft, otherwise the crowd
of heads belonged to men-emigrants--shabby and grimy; most of them
looking seasick, I thought, as they overhung the side.

A line was thrown from the ship, and the boat was hauled under the
yard-arm whip, where she lay rising and falling, carefully fended off
from the vessel's iron side by a couple of the men in her.

"Now, then, bear a hand!" shouted a voice from the poop; "get your
gangway unshipped, and stand by to hoist away handsomely."

A minute later a large chair with arms dangled over our heads, and was
caught by the fellows in the boat. A more uncomfortable,
nerve-capsizing performance I never took a part in. The water washed
with a thunderous sobbing sound along the metal bends of the ship,
that, as she stooped her side into the brine, flashed up the swell in
froth, hurling towards us also a recoiling billow, which made the dance
of the boat horribly bewildering and nauseating. One moment we were
floated, as it seemed to my eye, to the level of the bulwarks of the
stooping ship; the next we were in a valley, with the great bare hull
leaning away from us--an immense wet surface of red and black and
chequered band, her shrouds vanishing in a slope, and her yard-arms
forking up sky high.

"Now, madam," said the second mate, "will you please seat yourself in
that chair?"

Grace was very white, but she saw that it must be done, and with set
lips and in silence, was helped by the sailors to seat herself. I
adored her then for her spirit, for I confess that I had dreaded she
would hang back, shriek out, cling to me, and complicate and delay the
miserable business by her terrors. She was securely fastened into the
chair, and the second mate paused for the