I was very tired after my strenuous labours that day; moreover, I had
not yet fully recovered the strength that I had lost during my illness;
therefore, under ordinary circumstances, I should have gone to my cabin
and turned in soon after dinner. But as it was, I felt uneasy. I did
not at all like the look of the weather; I felt convinced that we were
booked for a blow, possibly a heavy one; and a further reference to the
barometer fully confirmed me in that conviction. If my foreboding
should prove to be correct, what would be the probable result? Should
the wreck but remain where she was, we would no doubt be all right, and
nothing worse would befall us than possibly an unpleasant and anxious
night. But if she did not, what then? She would gradually bump her way
over the few yards of the inner edge of the reef and then reach the
lagoon, in which she would probably founder, unless, indeed, she
remained afloat long enough to drive across it and fetch up again on the
opposite reef.

That was a possibility that I had long since recognised; but now, as I
looked out into the night and dimly saw the breakers thundering in upon
the outer end of the reef, shattering themselves into a wall of
madly-leaping water thirty feet high, and then continuing their course
across the reef in the form of foam-flecked waves, the power of which
was rapidly dissipated as they swept inward toward the wreck, I began to
doubt whether the _Stella Maris_ would ever again shift her berth. It
is true that those waves, as they swirled and foamed about her, had
power enough to cause the hull to rock a little now and again; but as to
lifting her bodily and throwing her into the lagoon--well, I thought it
unlikely. I reflected that when, in the first instance, she piled
herself up, there was a strong breeze blowing and a heavy sea running,
and that she had hit the reef stem-on under a heavy press of sail; yet
she had not then been flung right across the reef. The seas had brought
her so far, and then their power had failed to move her an inch farther.
Why should not that be the case now?

There was something comforting, almost reassuring, about this line of
argument; yet at the back of my mind there was another something that
seemed to tell me I must not take my data too much for granted--that
there was another possibility of which I must not permit myself quite to
lose sight. I therefore set myself to answer the question, in the event
of t