slowly, amidst the hideous and despairing shrieks of the doomed wretches
on board of her, she lifted her stern higher and higher, and plunged her
bows deeper and deeper. They shrieked, they cried to Heaven for help; but
Heaven heeded them not, for man's agony cannot avert man's doom. Now, for
a space, she was standing almost upright upon the water, out of which
about a hundred feet of her vast length towered like some monstrous ocean
growth, whilst men fell from her in showers, like flies benumbed by
frost, down into the churning foam beneath. Then suddenly, with a swift
and awful rush, with a rending sound of breaking spars, a loud explosion
of her boilers, and a smothered boom of bursting bulkheads, she plunged
down into the measureless deeps, and was seen no more forever.

The water closed in over where she had been, boiling and foaming and
sucking down all things in the wake of her last journey, while the steam
and prisoned air came up in huge hissing jets and bubbles that exploded
into spray on the surface.

The men groaned, the child stared stupified, and Augusta cried out, "_Oh!
oh_!" like one in pain.

"Row back!" she gasped, "row back and see if we cannot pick some
of them up."

"No! no!" shouted Meeson; "they will sink the boat!"

"'Taint much use anyway," said Johnnie. "I doubt that precious few of
them will come up again. They have gone too deep!"

However, they got the boat's head round again--slowly enough, Augusta
thought--and as they did so they heard a feeble cry or two. But by the