und two gallant young men to attend each young girl? This
merry half dozen, reclining in steamer chairs and muffled in shawls,
breathed the salt air and enjoyed the chaos into which the world had
fallen. On this deck, where usually there was a throng, they felt
themselves in some sense survivors of a world that had dropped away
from them, and they enjoyed their social solitude, spiced with apparent
peril that was not peril.

The enthusiastic Miss Sylvia Thorne, who was one of this party, was
very much interested in the billows, and in the attentions of a student
who sat opposite her. From time to time she remarked also on some of
the steerage passengers on the deck below; particularly was she
interested in a young girl who sat watching the threatening swells
emerge from the mist. Miss Sylvia spoke to the young lady alongside of
her about that interesting young girl in the steerage, but her
companion said she had so much trouble with the Irish at home that she
could not bear an Irish girl even at sea. Her mother, she went on to
say, had hired a girl who had proved most ungrateful, she had--but here
a scream from all the party told that a sea of more than usual
magnitude was running up against the port side. A minute later and all
were trying to keep their seats while the ship reeled away to starboard
with vast momentum, and settled swiftly again into the trough of the
sea.

Miss Thorne now wondered that the sail, which did not flap as she had
observed sails generally do, in poems, did not tear into shreds as she
had always known sails to do in novels when there was a rough sea. But
the blue-eyed student, having come from a fresh-water college, and
being now on a homeward voyage, knew all about it, and tried to explain
the difference between a sea like this and a storm or a squall. He
would have become hopelessly confused in a few minutes more had not a
lucky wave threatened to capsize his chair and so divert the
conversation from the sail to himself. And just as Sylvia was about to
change back to the sail again for the sake of relieving his
embarrassment, her hat strings, not having been so well secured as the
sail, gave way, and her hat went skimming down to the main deck below,
lodged a minute, and then took another flight forward. It would soon
have been riding the great waves on its own account, a mark for curious
sea gulls and hungry sharks to inspect, had not the Irish girl that
Sylvia had so much admired sprung