of the winds, the air was so thick with snow that, in the
speedily advancing hours of darkness, in which we should not fail to be
entrapped, we would be powerless to find our way at sea a foot. There
was no help for it; the poor victims of the shipwreck must that very
night know death in one or another most terrifying shape, 'if it was the
will of the Lord.' With this mournful conviction, about twenty of us
gathered at old Bill's house with the closing in of a darkness as of
Tartarus, and kept its watches. The anger of the storm abated in no way
whatever till morning, and then the sole change that took place was a
somewhat thinner aspect of the driving snow. Yet, even when this was
discerned, every man of us hastened to draw over his ordinary winter
garb an oil-cloth suit which enveloped him from head to foot, and
soberly announced himself ready to do his duty in the strait. That we
should be exposed to the greatest dangers was absolutely certain; and
whether a single survivor of the terrors of that awful night yet clung
to the few frail timbers in the sea, for us to rescue, none but Heaven
knew; still, the manhood of each demanded that what was possible to be
done in the matter we should at least attempt.

And so we started; the leader being old Bill, who to some end, that I
could not then divine, bore a boat-sail bundled on his back. Our first
business was to make way to our surf or life boat. This lay about three
miles from the village, reckoning as the crow flies, and was sheltered
under a rude house which stood on the shores of a bay opening by an
inlet into the sea. Our common way of gaining this house was through a
circuitous passage of the sounds; but these we soon discovered, in
consonance with a previous prediction of old Bill's, were entirely
frozen over save in certain parts of their channels; and hence, this
route being unnavigable for such boats as were at hand, which, without
exception, were light gunning and fishing skiffs, we were forced to
avail ourselves of a barely practicable land track of which we knew, and
which, as it led about among the marshes, was also circuitous. And the
necessity of choosing this land path added to our difficulties, in that
we were forced to provide ourselves with a small batteau and drag it
behind us, to be able to cross many ditches and sloughs with which it
was barred, and which, particularly along their edges, were never really
frozen. After toiling and battling for a lon