f her
trust, and with his eyes fastened on the sail which rose against the
light, he waited thus--for death.

I was light, and a strong swimmer. I had been tossed on those waves from
my birth. Buffeted, fatigued, blind with the salt sea-spray, drenched
with the weight of the water, I struggled across that calm dread width
of glassy coldness, and breathless reached the land.

By signs and cries I made them wot that something needed them at sea.
They began to get ready a little boat, bringing it down from its wooden
rest on high dry ground beneath the cliff. Whilst they pushed and
dragged through the deep-furrowed sand I gazed seaward. The shore was
raised; I could see straight athwart the waters. They now were level
with the rock; and yet he had never moved.

The little skiff had passed round the bend of a bluff, and was out of
his sight and ours.

The boat was pushed into the surf; they threw me in. They could see
nothing, and trusted to my guidance.

I had skill enough to make them discover whither it was I wanted them to
go. Then, looking in their eagerness whither my eyes went, they saw him
on the rock, and with a sudden exercise of passionate vigour, bent to
their oars and sent the boat against the hard opposing force of the
resisting tide. For they perceived that, from some cause, he was
motionless there, and could not use his strength; and they knew that it
would be shame to their manhood if, within sight of their land, the
creature who had succoured their brethren in the snow, and saved the
two-year child from the storm, should perish before their sight on a
calm and unfretted sea and in a full noon sun.

It was but a furlong to that rock; it was but the breadth of the beach,
that at low water stretched uncovered; and yet how slowly the boat sped,
with the ruthless tide sweeping it back as fast as the oars bore it
forward!

So near we seemed to him that one would have thought a stone flung from
us through the air would have lit far beyond him; and yet the space was
enough, more than enough, to bar us from him, filled as it was with the
strong adverse pressure of those low, swift, in-rushing waves.

The waters leaped above the summit of the rock, and for a moment covered
him. A great shout went up from the rowers beside me. They strained in
every nerve to reach him; and the roll of a fresh swell of water lifted
the boat farther than their uttermost effort could achieve, but lifted
her backward, backward