could feel that sliding, hopeless drag against which he was powerless
to combat. His strength vanished ounce by ounce. His arms grew so
numb with fatigue and cold that he could do nothing but move them up
and down, dog fashion. On he went, down toward the stern of the vessel.

He was moving as swiftly as the current was, whirling, twisting like a
piece of wood. His mind dulled. He longed for death now.
Instinctively he wished to get out of all the worry and struggle
against dissolution. His one dominant idea was to throw up his hands
and go down, down the deep descent. With a great cry of relief he
yielded to the alluring thought. Up flew his arms above his head--and
he felt so warm and cheerful! Something struck his outstretched hand
and the fingers closed upon it. For a minute they gripped the swinging
piece of rope. Then he opened his eyes to find he was hanging to a
flimsy Jacob's ladder, suspended from the stern. With a new strength
born of hope he flung up his feet, shooting them through the hempen
rungs; and there he stayed for a while--it seemed almost an eternity.
Then laboriously climbing the ladder, he made the deck and there
dropped as insensate as a log.

It was the happiest Christmas Day that Dan had ever known, and he told
himself so as he walked slowly down South Street. Unschooled in the
ethics of self-sacrifice as he was, he yet knew he had done something
for a fellow man, for a man he despised; and something indefinable yet
unmistakable told him it was very good. He felt bigger, broader, felt
as though he had attained new stature in something that was not
physical. And always, vaguely, he had been as anxious to feel this as
he had been to get on in a material way. He had lost his rowboat in
the act. And yet withal there was a certain fierce satisfaction in his
loss--he had caught the spirit of Christmas. How much wiser, how much
stronger he was to-day than on the previous afternoon.

So deep were his thoughts that he almost ran into Captain Barney.

"Hey, there!" snarled the tugboatman, most ungraciously, "I just left a
new rowboat down in the Battery basin for you." And that was all he
said.

And Dan, as he trembled with rage, knew that Captain Barney might have
said the right word and made Christmas Day all the more glorious. But
he had said the wrong thing, done the wrong thing, and he had by his
words and in his act taken much from Dan's Christmas happiness. Dan
knew