Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/147

Rh he assured the passengers that on the morrow they should be in New York. All, therefore, went to rest, and were woke in the early dawn by the vessel being aground. The helmsman had mistaken one beacon in these roads for another. They were not far from land, and the waves were running towards the land, so that several of the passengers had themselves lashed to planks, and thus came to shore although half dead. This mode of saving her life was offered to Margaret Fuller, but she refused it; she would not be saved without her husband and her child.

Before her embarkation from Italy, she wrote to one of her friends in America, “I have a presentiment that some great change in my fate is at hand. I feel the approach of a crisis. Ossoli was warned by a fortune-teller in his youth to beware of the sea, and this is his first great voyage; but if a misfortune should happen, I shall perish with my husband and my child.” And now the moment which had been foreshadowed to her was come, and she would perish with her beloved ones!

A sailor took the little boy, and bound him to a plank together with a little Italian girl, and threw himself into the sea with them, in the hope of saving them. They told Margaret Fuller that they had safely neared the shore. They told her that Ossoli also was saved. And then it was that she consented also to be lashed to a plank. She never reached the shore. A wave had washed Ossoli from the deck into the deep; the corpse of neither has ever been found; but the little boy was found upon a reef of sand still lashed with the little Italian girl to the plank, but both were dead.

“A quick death and a short death-struggle!” had always been Margaret Fuller's prayer. It had been fulfilled, and she was, and she is, with her beloved ones.

But her mother and her sisters who came to meet her at New York,—their sorrow almost approaches to