Page:Princess Mary's Gift Book.djvu/35

 Rh longer in the gale, and a hundred men stood and watched her, talking of other winds and other wrecks, and of Peel boys who were out on the sea. At last the ship parted her cables and went rolling like a blinded porpoise dead on for the jagged coast.

Seven men took an open fishing-boat and went after her, and we climbed the Head to look at them. The wind smote us there like an invisible wing, sometimes swirling us out of our course, often bringing us to our knees, and whipping our ears with our hair like rods. Sheets of spray were coming up to us from below and running along the cliffs like driven rain. The sun, which bad broken in fierce brilliance from a green rent in the sky, made rainbows in the flying foam.

From the heights we watched the seven men and the open boat. They rose and fell, appeared and disappeared, but they overtook the Welshman before she had drifted on to the coast, boarded her with difficulty, let go another anchor and made her tight. There was nothing else to do, for she was disabled, and her sails were torn to shreds. The new anchor held the ship an hour longer, and then there was no help left for her. She was within a hundred feet of the rocks, and she fell on them with the groan of a living creature.

The instant her head was down the white lions of the sea leapt over her, the water swirled through her bulwarks and plunged down her hatch; her helm was unshipped, her sails were torn from their gaskets, and the floating home wherein men had sailed and sung and slept and laughed and jested was a broken wreck in the heavy wallowings of the waves.

When it was over and we were coming back, drenched through and green with the drift of the sea foam caked thick on our faces, some of us began to think of Charlie. He had not been there that day. A year or more ago, in the prime of a splendid manhood, he was stricken by heart disease. He kept a good heart, nevertheless, and by indomitable will held on for some time. First a little work, then no work at all, only a sail now and then if the sea was calm, but of late hardly ever well enough to take the open air. The old hulk of his poor body had been anchored deep, but she was parting her cables at last.

Charlie lay dying while this second rescue was being made. He had not answered the signal for the lifeboat, but he had heard it in the