n the shoal. With every
lift her timbers writhe and creak, and all the remaining upper works
crack and burst open with the strain.

Reuben chances to espy an old-fashioned round life-buoy lashed to the
taffrail, and, cutting it loose, makes himself fast to it. He overhears
the boatswain say, yonder by the forecastle, "These thumpings will break
her in two in an hour. Cling to a spar, Jack."

The gray light of dawn at last breaks, and shows a dim line of shore, on
which parties are moving, dragging some machine, with which they hope to
cast a line over the wreck. But the swell is heavier than ever, the
timbers nearer to parting. At last a flash of lurid light from the dim
shore-line,--a great boom of sound, and a line goes spinning out like a
spider's web up into the gray, bleak sky. Too far! too short! and the
line tumbles, plashing into the water. A new and fearful lift of the sea
shatters the wreck, the fore part of the ship still holding fast to the
sands; but all abaft the mainmast lifts, surges, reels, topples over;
with the wreck, and in the angry swirl and torment of waters, Reuben
goes down.

LXV.

That morning,--it was the 22d of September, in the year 1842,--Mr.
Brindlock came into his counting-room some two hours before noon, and
says to his porter and factotum, as he enters the door, "Well, Roger, I
suppose you 'll be counting this puff of a southeaster the equinoctial,
eh?"

"Indeed, sir, and it 's an awful one. The Meteor 's gone ashore on Long
Beach; and there 's talk of young Mr. Johns being lost."

"Good Heavens!" said Brindlock, "you don't tell me so!"

By half past three he was upon the spot; a little remaining fragment
only of the Meteor hanging to the sands, and a great _debris_ of bales,
spars, shattered timbers, bodies, drifted along the shore,--Reuben's
among them.

But he is not dead; at least so say the wreckers, who throng upon the
beach; the life-buoy is still fast to him, though he is fearfully
shattered and bruised. He is borne away under the orders of Brindlock to
some near house, and presently revives enough to ask that he may be
carried--"home."

As, in the opening of this story, his old grandfather, the Major, was
borne away from the scene of his first battle by easy stages homeward,
so now the grandson, far feebler and after more terrible encounter with
death, is carried by "easy stages" to his home in Ashfield. Again the
city, the boat, the river,--with its banks yellowi