Page:Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands.djvu/54

 BARDSEY S REEF. 29

towards which we were propelled by wind and tide. At the first appaling glance, it would seem that we were scarcely a ship s length from it. In the agony of the moment, the captain, clasping his hands, exclaimed that all was lost. Still, under this weight of anguish, more for others than himself, he was enabled to give the most minute orders with entire presence of mind. They were promptly obeyed ; the ship, as if instinct with intelligence, answered her helm, and sweeping rap idly around, escaped the jaws of destruction. Still we were long in troubled waters, and it was not for many hours, and until we had entirely passed Holyhead, that the captain took his eye from the glass, or quitted his post of observation. It would seem that, after he had retired to rest the previous night, the ship must have been imperfectly steered, and aided by the strong drift ing of the tides in that region, was led out of her course towards Cardigan Bay, thus encountering the reef which is laid down on the charts as Bardsey s Isle.

The passengers, during this period of peril, were gdhe rally quiet, and offered no obstruction, through their own alarms, to the necessary evolutions on deck. One from the steerage, an Irishman, who had been thought, but a few days before, in the last stages of pulmonary disease, was seen, in the excitement of the moment, laboring among the ropes and blocks, as if in full health and vigor. It was fearful to see him, with a face of such mortal paleness, springing away from death in one form, to meet and resist him in another.

Every circumstance and personage connected with

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