ther!" pointed Mina.

Carroll looked, and rose to her feet in excitement.

Three little toy ships--or so they seemed compared to the mountains of
water--lay broadside-to, just inside the farthest line of breakers. Two
were sailing schooners. These had been thrown on their beam ends, their
masts pointing at an angle toward the beach. Each wave, as it reached,
stirred them a trifle, then broke in a deluge of water that for a moment
covered their hulls completely from sight. With a mighty suction the
billow drained away, carrying with it wreckage. The third vessel was a
steam barge. She, too, was broadside to the seas, but had caught in some
hole in the bar so that she lay far down by the head. The shoreward side
of her upper works had, for some freakish reason, given away first, so
now the interior of her staterooms and saloons was exposed to view as in
the cross-section of a model ship. Over her, too, the great waves
hurled themselves, each carrying away its spoil. To Carroll it seemed
fantastically as though the barge were made of sugar, and that each sea
melted her precisely as Bobby loved to melt the lump in his chocolate by
raising and lowering it in a spoon.

And the queer part of it all was that these waves, so mighty in their
effects, appeared to the woman no different from those she had often
watched in the light summer blows that for a few hours raise the "white
caps" on the lake. They came in from the open in the same swift yet
deliberate ranks; they gathered with the same leisurely pauses; they
broke with the same rush and roar. They seemed no larger, but everything
else had been struck small--the tiny ships, the toy piers, the ant-like
swarm of people on the shore. She looked on it as a spectacle. It had as
yet no human significance.

"Poor fellows!" cried Mina.

"What?" asked Carroll.

"Don't you see them?" queried the other.

Carroll looked, and in the rigging of the schooner she made out a number
of black objects.

"Are those men?--up the masts?" she cried.

She set Prince in motion toward the beach.

At the foot of the bluff the plank road ran out into the deep sand.
Through this the phaeton made its way heavily. The fine particles were
blown in the air like a spray, mingling with the spume from the lake,
stinging Carroll's face like so many needles. Already the beach was
strewn with pieces of wreckage, some of it cast high above the wash,
others still thrown up and sucked back by each wave, o