ange ship. With the
lightning-like celerity of decision that seems to be instinct in moments
of sudden, awful peril, I determined to drive the schooner ashore stem-
on; hoping that, aided by our light draught of water, we might be hove
up high enough on the beach, or whatever it was, to permit of the escape
of at least a few of us with our lives; and I shouted to the helmsman to
steady his helm, the breakers right ahead of us seeming to be less high
and furious than those on either bow. There was no time for more; no
time to order all hands on deck; no time even to utter a warning cry to
those already on deck to grasp the nearest thing to hand and cling for
their lives, for my cry to the helmsman was still on my lips when the
schooner seemed to leap down upon the barrier of madly-plunging
breakers, and in an instant we were hemmed about with a crashing fury of
white water that boiled and leaped about us, smiting the schooner in all
parts of her hull at once, foaming in over the rail here, there, and
everywhere like a pack of hungry wolves, spouting high in air and flying
over us in blinding deluges of spray until the poor little craft seemed
to be buried; while I, without knowing how I got there, found myself on
the wheel-grating, assisting the helmsman, with the yeasty water
swirling about our knees as it boiled in over the taffrail. I caught a
momentary glimpse of the strange ship as we swept athwart her stern at a
distance of less than a hundred fathoms. Her black bulk was sharply
outlined against the luminous loam as a whelming breaker passed inshore
of her, and left her, for a second, up-hove on the breast of the next
one; and I could see that she was on her beam-ends--a large ship of
probably twelve hundred tons. I could see no sign of people on board
her, but that was not surprising; they had probably been all swept
overboard by the first mountain--wall of water that swept over her after
she had broached-to.

And such was to be our fate also. My only wonder was that it had not
come already; but come it must, and I braced myself for the shock,
already feeling in imagination the terrific grinding concussion, the
sickening jar, the awful upheaval of the schooner's quivering frame, and
the wrenching of her timbers asunder. But second after second sped, and
the shock did not come; and half-buried in the boiling swirl of maddened
waters, the schooner swept ahead, now up-hove on the breast of a fiery
breaker that