herself and the baby safely at the same time; the
little one might be washed out of her arms and lost."

"Oh, monsieur, what shall I do?" wailed the poor, terrified creature.
"Have we to cross by that rope?"

"I fear there is no other way," I replied gently.

"I can never do it! I can never do it!" she ejaculated despairingly.
"The sea will drag me and my little Mimi off, and we shall be drowned!"

"Under the circumstances, monsieur, there seems to be only one thing for
it," said I; "you must go first, carrying the child, and as soon as you
are safe, I will follow with madame. Is that arrangement to your
liking?"

The man intimated that it was; and forthwith we commenced the
preparations necessary to secure for the poor little wailing mite of
humanity a chance of surviving the fearful journey. And a fearful
journey it certainly was, even for a strong man; how much more so, then,
for a weak, terrified woman, or a helpless child, less than a year old?

The arrangement was this: The _City of Cawnpore's_ to wing-hawser was
now stretched between the two vessels, one end being made fast to the
barque's mizenmast, while the other end led in over the _City of
Cawnpore's_ bows, through a warping chock, and was secured somewhere
inboard, probably to the windlass bitts--it would have been much more
convenient had the hawser been made fast to the foremast, about fifteen
or twenty feet from the deck; but a very heavy intermittent strain was
being thrown upon it, and I imagined that Dacre did not care to run the
risk of springing so important a spar. The effect of this was that the
_City of Cawnpore_, with both topsails thrown flat aback, was now
actually riding by her hawser to the barque, as to a sea anchor, the
deeply-submerged hull of the French craft offering sufficient resistance
to the drift of the _City of Cawnpore_ to keep the hawser taut, except
at the rather frequent intervals when the heave of the sea flung the
barque far enough to leeward to temporarily slacken it. And it was by
means of this hawser--at one moment taut as a bar, and, at the next,
sagging slack enough to dip into the water--that the Frenchmen were to
be hauled from their ship to ours.

Meanwhile, the work of securing the hawser aboard the _City of
Cawnpore_, and the clearing away of the travelling-gear, had been going
briskly forward, and at the moment when the Frenchman and I came to an
understanding I saw the slung bosun's chair hove over th