N the middle of the month of April a large schooner, named the L. B. Wing, was proceeding on her voyage from Matanzas to New York. The weather was fine, though indications were not wanting of a change at hand. But meanwhile all possible advantage was to be taken of the fine, bright, sweeping breeze that was blowing abeam, and under every stitch that could be piled upon her the schooner buzzed merrily along. As the day advanced the wind gathered weight, and the waves sped with swifter rushings, and the blue of the water grew hard and pale. Canvas was reduced, though always reluctantly, and not until the increasing gale had buried the starboard wash-streak, and brought the wilderness of flying and leaping and throbbing foam to leeward within an arm's-length of the rail of the bulwark. It was mad sailing, true Yankee fashion, but beyond expression thrilling and inspiriting. The vessel was too hard driven to jump the seas; she cut clean through them, smothering her forecastle in the smoke of the boiling surges, and she swept along in such a whirl and tremble of creaming waves that, watching her from a distance, times were when no more could have been seen of her than her shapely leaning masts and gleaming sails forking out of the smother of foam; though again and again her whole black, glistening length would soar with a beautiful spring from the spray that had buried it, and poise itself, all radiant and sparkling, in the evening sunshine, upon the foamless head of some tall sea, as though, like a bird, she stood swelling herself upon this perch an instant, before darting towards the sky upon her shining wings.

But slowly and surely the gale grew in weight and fury, and day

break of the morning of April 16 found the L. B. Wing hove to under a shred of gaff foresail in the midst of a violent tempest, and plunging upon a sea that was every hour growing wilder and more dangerous. Though the schooner was large for her class, she was still but a small vessel to encounter the sea that was now running and steadily increasing in magnitude and velocity. She laboured furiously, and now and then when, after a sudden yaw, a wild come-to shoved her nose into the eye of the gale, she would seem to stand end on to the sea, the water flush with the taffrail and twenty feet of her keel in the air; following the staggering rear-up with a sickening swoop downwards that buried her bowsprit in the next sea. A bit of a deck-house just abaft the galley served as a forecastle for the men, and here they sheltered themselves. The tiller was lashed, for no steering was wanted, nothing but a steady helm, and the only people who kept the deck aft were the captain and the steward. The thundering of the seas over the deck-house frightened the men in it presently. Every two or three minutes a whole ocean of green water would shoot over the weather bow, and fall, like the roof of a church tumbling in, and send the scantling quivering and cracking, until one of the men sang out that "if they stopped there they'd all go overboard along with the house, for it was impossible it could stand that hammering much longer." This raised a panic, and, besides, they were no better off in the house than they would have been on deck, for the combings in which the door travelled had been carried away, and the water stood up on the floor as high as the men's knees. So, watching their chance, they flung open the door, and turned to and cleared out, and got together in a crowd under the weather bulwark, where they stood waiting and wondering what would happen next. Aft, where the captain and steward were, was the only safe place, if the decks of that storm-swept schooner offered any safety at all, and it is a wonder to me that the skipper did not call the men about him and keep them at his end of the vessel. From where he stood he had a view of the sea that was not to be got by the men who squatted and crowded under the bulwark, and presently, looking to windward, he spied a monster wave coming at the vessel. It stood up among the other seas like a cliff. It looked to be three or four miles long, and it made an horizon of its own, as though the ocean, from where that wave was to where the water met the sky behind it, had been lifted up twenty feet. Its roaring could be heard when it was almost a league distant. Its rush was headlong, terrific to see, not a break of foam to relieve its hard, green, glass-like summits; and the skipper had scarcely time to yell out to the men to hold on for their lives, and to fling himself flat with his arms through the bight of a rope, when the sea was over them and

the hull of the schooner, from the forecastle to as far as ten feet abaft the mainmast, buried. The vessel was rolled over to an angle that, had her yards been square, would have plunged the lee foreyardarm into the water almost to the slings. The shock and thunder of the blow, the booming and seething and grinding of this stupendous wave as it coiled its flying folds over the doomed vessel, could not be con

veyed, with any approach to truth, by words. The schooner shot out of the monstrous sea that went raging away to leeward, and the captain, regaining his feet, looked about him. In an instant he perceived that he and the steward, who lay crouching close against the tiller, were the only persons whom that wave had left on the schooner. All the rest of the crew had been swept overboard, and within a stone's throw

of the vessel, on the lee quarter, were four or five of them struggling, and vanishing, and reappearing, like pieces of torn black sea-weed among the boiling seas. No help could be given them. The steward was struck motionless by horror and fear. The rushing of the water along the decks, the violent inclination of the schooner when the seas heeled her over, rendered it impossible for the captain to let go his hold, and one by one the drowning men vanished, full in his sight. Though bereft of their companions, there was still hope for the two survivors if the weather moderated. The schooner remained apparently seaworthy; it would, indeed, be a hard job for two men to navigate so big a vessel; yet, with watch-tackles and the winch enough canvas could be spread to give her good way, and it was not to be doubted but that a sail would heave in sight before many hours had passed. But the gale, though it bated its fury somewhat, soon after the crew had been swept overboard, continued to blow with great violence. The schooner was at this time as nearly as possible in lat. 33 N. and long. 35° W.-that is, in the heart of the North Atlantic, where the seas in a gale of wind would be at their highest, having an immense ocean for a playground and no land to check them for hundreds of leagues. Few worse trials than what these two men were now to endure ever befel sailors. Only a few hours before, so to speak, the schooner was gaily speeding on her way under a blue sky, and over a sea "wreathed with crisp smiles;" and now here she was, struggling like a creature of instinct in the throes of death, of her little company only two left, in whose ears the drowning shrieks of their miserable shipmates kept ringing, with a note that sounded high above the bellowing in the rigging and the crash and uproar of storming surges. The rest of the day and all through the night the tempest stormed, sometimes sinking its fury so as to kindle hope in the breasts of the two weary watchers who crouched together far aft, and then raging again until it was a wonder that the masts of the vessel were not blown clean out of her. Long ago the little fragment of foresail had been split, and whipped itself into rags until not a remnant of it was visible upon the gaff; yet the schooner struggled nobly, shipping tons of water over her bows, which the next send would precipitate over the bulwarks in a great frothing cascade, yet always shaking herself free, and again confronting the next of the mighty waves which rolled down upon her in an endless succession. The night passed, and the morning found the schooner still breasting the seas, and the two men clinging to her decks. But shortly after daybreak, and while the slate-coloured sky, under which masses of sulphur-coloured scud were flying, like the outpourings of a hundred factory chimneys, lay dark with the shadow of night upon it in the

west, a great wave took the vessel, and swept her on to her beam-ends, and she began to fill. For a brief while the two men thought she would right, and they lay motionless up and down the deck, as though they hung against the side of a house. But they soon saw that it was all over with the schooner, and that she must sink in a few minutes; and, calling to the steward to imitate his behaviour, the captain let himself slide down the deck, and crawled along to the davits, where their little quarter-boat hung. This they succeeded in launching without mishap, owing to the shelter furnished by the hull of the schooner, and putting up a prayer for mercy and protection, they shoved off into the raging sea, clear of the spars and gear of the vessel, whose masts lay along the water. Not two minutes after they had got away she righted somewhat, her masts lifting out of the sea with extraordinary swiftness; but every wave that struck her buried her, and the boat had not drifted far to leeward when the schooner went down.

If I were not very well assured of the truth of what I am relating, I should wish to stop here; for it seems incredible that a small boatno bigger than what would be carried by a smack of twenty tonsshould have lived a minute in the tremendous North Atlantic sea that was then raging. Yet it is declared that the tiny craft topped the enormous surges like a cork. The heads of the seas blew into her when she was in the hollows, and kept the men baling, but she rose and fell like a sleeping sea-gull, though the men say that, when the seas swept her up, the sensation was that of being darted into the air by the grapnel of a balloon, while the swoop into the watery chasms produced a feeling of death-like sickness, such as might be experienced by a person in the act of falling from a great height. They had no food nor water in the boat, but they did not think of that now. The indescribable horror of their situation blunted the grosser instincts. Every moment they expected to find themselves in the water struggling and drowning. As the time passed and the boat still lived, they found nothing reassuring in the protraction of their lives. If this wave had not filled and rolled the boat over, the next might: and though the next passed under them, the following one might drown them. It is difficult to realise the agony of expectation of that kind. It would be easier to imagine the feelings of a man with a rope round his neck waiting for the trap to fall under his feet. To figure that soaring and sinking boat you must have the picture of the mighty strife of waters, the ever-recurring menace of the gigantic seas, the desolate yelling of the gale shrieking and raging along under the dark, cold, sunless sky. The gale broke that afternoon, and by nightfall no more than a strong wind was blowing. But, great as was the improvement in the weather, to the occupants of the little boat it was still a storm, and the fretting