of times he took up the glass and directed it towards the
downs, where a group of people were moving about.

The chalk-white wall of water, rising and falling, grew higher and
higher as they approached it; the noise and the dull roar of the
breakers became more and more deafening, and a feeling of faintness
crept over Elizabeth as she looked towards the land, and began to
realise their danger.

The suspense was so painfully prolonged, a mist was coming before her
eyes, so that she could scarcely see Salve over at the wheel; and she
tried, in her terror, to keep them fixed upon the child in her arms. The
seething, hissing sound in the air around her kept increasing, and made
her giddy; a confusion of wild sounds, that grew louder and ever louder,
seemed to fill her brain; and before her eyes there was nothing but a
whirl of scudding flakes of white. A mass of sand-laden foaming water
appeared then suddenly to rise before her with a towering crest; she
heard one loud cry of terror from different voices; the brig seemed
lifted high in the air; the mainmast tottered; and a suffocating deluge
of water came crashing down upon her, nearly carrying her with it down
the cabin stairs, where she was clinging. Again and again it came, and
her one thought now was to hold fast.

When she returned to consciousness again, Salve was by her side. They
were fastened to the same rope, and all the crew had come aft, and
lashed themselves there. The brig lay over on her side upon the inner
bank, with her stern up, and with the mainmast lying over the side. She
kept lifting and striking heavily against the bottom, while heavy seas,
one after another, swept her forward.

"The rigging to leeward must be cleared away, and we shall get off,
lads!" shouted Salve, through his hollowed hand; and he sprang over with
an axe to do it. Nils Buvaagen came to his assistance, and Elizabeth, in
intense anxiety, watched the two men while they cut away rope after
rope, holding on by the rigging all the time, the sea breaking over
them, so that sometimes they were hardly visible through the drench of
water. After one last stroke, which freed them from the mast, Salve was
by her side again.

The next moment they were carried over the bank by the yellow churning
surge, and with a succession of jerks and bumps, over to the shoal
inside, where the bow-timbers were stove in--"the best thing that could
have happened to them," Salve said, coolly, "as it would r