ople
around me made me stay; urging, as I confusedly perceived, that he was
bent on going, with help or without, and that I should endanger the
precautions for his safety by troubling those with whom they rested. I
don't know what I answered, or what they rejoined; but I saw hurry on
the beach, and men running with ropes from a capstan that was there, and
penetrating into a circle of figures that hid him from me. Then, I saw
him standing alone, in a seaman's frock and trousers: a rope in his
hand, or slung to his wrist: another round his body: and several of the
best men holding, at a little distance, to the latter, which he laid out
himself, slack upon the shore, at his feet.

The wreck, even to my unpractised eye, was breaking up. I saw that she
was parting in the middle, and that the life of the solitary man upon
the mast hung by a thread. Still, he clung to it. He had a singular red
cap on,--not like a sailor's cap, but of a finer colour; and as the few
yielding planks between him and destruction rolled and bulged, and his
anticipative death-knell rung, he was seen by all of us to wave it. I
saw him do it now, and thought I was going distracted, when his action
brought an old remembrance to my mind of a once dear friend.

Ham watched the sea, standing alone, with the silence of suspended
breath behind him, and the storm before, until there was a great
retiring wave, when, with a backward glance at those who held the rope
which was made fast round his body, he dashed in after it, and in a
moment was buffeting with the water; rising with the hills, falling
with the valleys, lost beneath the foam; then drawn again to land. They
hauled in hastily.

He was hurt. I saw blood on his face, from where I stood; but he took
no thought of that. He seemed hurriedly to give them some directions for
leaving him more free--or so I judged from the motion of his arm--and
was gone as before.

And now he made for the wreck, rising with the hills, falling with the
valleys, lost beneath the rugged foam, borne in towards the shore,
borne on towards the ship, striving hard and valiantly. The distance was
nothing, but the power of the sea and wind made the strife deadly. At
length he neared the wreck. He was so near, that with one more of his
vigorous strokes he would be clinging to it,--when a high, green, vast
hill-side of water, moving on shoreward, from beyond the ship, he seemed
to leap up into it with a mighty bound, and the ship