words he
had spoken to his child in the first shock of discovering that she had
helped to deceive him smote him to the heart. He instantly determined to
give his daughter a refuge on board his own vessel, and to quiet her by
keeping her villain of a husband out of the way of all harm at my hands.
The yacht sailed three feet and more to the ship's one. There was no
doubt of our overtaking _La Grace de Dieu_; the only fear was that we
might pass her in the darkness.

"After we had been some little time out, the wind suddenly dropped, and
there fell on us an airless, sultry calm. When the order came to get
the topmasts on deck, and to shift the large sails, we all knew what to
expect. In little better than an hour more, the storm was upon us, the
thunder was pealing over our heads, and the yacht was running for it.
She was a powerful schooner-rigged vessel of three hundred tons,
as strong as wood and iron could make her; she was handled by a
sailing-master who thoroughly understood his work, and she behaved
nobly. As the new morning came, the fury of the wind, blowing still from
the southwest quarter, subsided a little, and the sea was less heavy.
Just before daybreak we heard faintly, through the howling of the gale,
the report of a gun. The men collected anxiously on deck, looked at each
other, and said: 'There she is!'

"With the daybreak we saw the vessel, and the timber-ship it was. She
lay wallowing in the trough of the sea, her foremast and her mainmast
both gone--a water-logged wreck. The yacht carried three boats;
one amidships, and two slung to davits on the quarters; and the
sailing-master, seeing signs of the storm renewing its fury before long,
determined on lowering the quarter-boats while the lull lasted. Few as
the people were on board the wreck, they were too many for one boat, and
the risk of trying two boats at once was thought less, in the critical
state of the weather, than the risk of making two separate trips from
the yacht to the ship. There might be time to make one trip in safety,
but no man could look at the heavens and say there would be time enough
for two.

"The boats were manned by volunteers from the crew, I being in the
second of the two. When the first boat was got alongside of the
timber-ship--a service of difficulty and danger which no words can
describe--all the men on board made a rash to leave the wreck together.
If the boat had not been pulled off again before the whole of them h