y
misbehaving, that I declare I could have wept for bitterness of spirit.
But it was no time for weeping; we had other guesswork on hand, and we
buckled to our work with a will. We agreed that the straightest course
open to us was to cut away the mainmast, and this we promptly set about
doing. There are few sadder sights in the world than to see stout
fellows striving with all their strength to hew down the mainmast of a
goodly ship. The fall of a great tree in a forest preaches its sermon,
but not with half the poignancy of a noble mast which men who love their
vessel are compelled to cast overboard. As the axes rose and fell it
seemed to me as if their every stroke dealt me a hurt at the heart. As
the white wood flew it would not have surprised me if blood had
followed upon the blow--as I have read the like concerning a tree in
some old tale--so dear was the ship to me. A man's first ship is like a
man's first love, and grips him hard, and he parts from neither without
agony. When at last our purpose was accomplished, and the mast swayed to
its fall, I could have sat me down and blubbered like a baby.

And yet in another moment, so strange is the ordering of human affairs
and so much irony is there in the lessons of life, we who were all ready
to weep for the loss of our mainmast would have been only too glad to
say good-bye to it. For while its fall augmented the shock, and made us
in worse case that way, we were not lightened of it for all our pains,
for it was so entangled with the rigging that we could not for all our
efforts get it overboard. We were now in sheer desperation, for it did
not seem as if we could ever get our ship free, but must needs bide
there in our agony until she broke and gave us all to the waters. But a
little after there came a gleam of hope, for the furious wind and rain
abated, and finally fell away altogether, and at last the longest night
I had ever known came to an end, and the dawn came creeping up to the
sky as I had often seen it come creeping when I awakened early lying on
my bed in Sendennis. Oh, the joy to hail the daylight again, and yet
what a terrible condition of things the daylight showed to us! There was
our ship stuck fast on the bank; there was her deck all encumbered with
the fallen mast and the twisted ropes and the riven sails. Every man's
face was as white as a dish, and there was fear in every man's eyes. Nor
was it longer possible to pacify all the women-folk or the c