dizzy notion that this saved him from clutching some one's
throat.

"You'd better begin to pray, you fellers," he cried at last, with
a quaver in his tones. "We're goin' smash-ti-belter onto them rocks,
and Davy Jones is settin' on extra plates for eight at breakfast
to-morrer mornin'. Do your prayin' now."

"The only Scripture that occurs to me just now," said Hiram, in a
hush of the gale, "is that 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.'"

That was veritably a Delphic utterance at that moment, had Hiram only
known it.

Some one has suggested that there is a providence that watches over
children and fools. It is certain that chance does play strange
antics. Men have fallen from balloons and lived. Other men have
slipped on a banana skin and died. Men have fought to save themselves
from destruction, and have been destroyed. Other men have resigned
themselves and have won out triumphantly.

The doomed _Dobson_ was swashing toward the roaring shore broadside
on. The first ledge would roll her bottom up, beating in her punky
breast at the same time. This was the programme the doleful skipper
had pictured in his mind. There was no way of winning a chance through
the rocks, such as there might have been with steerageway, a tenuous
chance, and yet a chance. But the Cap'n decided with apathy and
resignation to fate that one man could not raise a sail out of that
wreck forward and at the same time heave her up to a course for the
sake of that chance.

As to Imogene he had not reckoned.

Perhaps that faithful pachyderm decided to die with her master
embraced in her trunk. Perhaps she decided that the quarter-deck was
farther above water than the waist.

At any rate, curving back her trunk and "roomping" out the
perturbation of her spirit, she reared on her hind-legs, boosted
herself upon the roof of the house, and clawed aft. This
auto-shifting of cargo lifted the bow of the little schooner. Her
jibs, swashing soggily about her bow, were hoisted out of the water,
and a gust bellied them. On the pivot of her buried stern the _Dobson_
swung like a top just as twin ledges threatened her broadside, and
she danced gayly between them, the wind tugging her along by her
far-flung jibs.

In matter of wrecks, it is the outer rocks that smash; it is the teeth
of these ledges that tear timbers and macerate men. The straggling
remains are found later in the sandy cove.

But with Imogene as unwitting master mariner in the cris