hen they
laid a plan. They told her to wait a year and a day, and if at the end
of that time she still felt that she could not marry the Duke, she might
marry the lawyer with their full consent. The result was as they had
foreseen: gladness came again, and the flush of returning health. Then
the parents took the next step in their scheme. They had the family
physician recommend a long sea voyage and much land travel for the
thorough restoration of the blonde's strength; and they invited the Duke
to be of the party. They judged that the Duke's constant presence and
the lawyer's protracted absence would do the rest--for they did not
invite the lawyer.

So they set sail in a steamer for America--and the third day out, when
their sea-sickness called truce and permitted them to take their first
meal at the public table, behold there sat the lawyer! The Duke and
party made the best of an awkward situation; the voyage progressed, and
the vessel neared America.

But, by and by, two hundred miles off New Bedford, the ship took fire;
she burned to the water's edge; of all her crew and passengers, only
thirty were saved. They floated about the sea half an afternoon and all
night long. Among them were our friends. The lawyer, by superhuman
exertions, had saved the blonde and her parents, swimming back and forth
two hundred yards and bringing one each time--(the girl first). The Duke
had saved himself. In the morning two whale ships arrived on the scene
and sent their boats. The weather was stormy and the embarkation was
attended with much confusion and excitement. The lawyer did his duty
like a man; helped his exhausted and insensible blonde, her parents and
some others into a boat (the Duke helped himself in); then a child fell
overboard at the other end of the raft and the lawyer rushed thither and
helped half a dozen people fish it out, under the stimulus of its
mother's screams. Then he ran back--a few seconds too late--the blonde's
boat was under way. So he had to take the other boat, and go to the
other ship. The storm increased and drove the vessels out of sight of
each other--drove them whither it would.

When it calmed, at the end of three days, the blonde's ship was seven
hundred miles north of Boston and the other about seven hundred south of
that port. The blonde's captain was bound on a whaling cruise in the
North Atlantic and could not go back such a distance or make a port
without orders; such bei