All was now easy. At a nod from Jim young Zeb passed down a second
line, which was lowered along the first by a noose. One by one the
whole crew--four men and a cabin-boy--were hauled up out of death, borne
off to the vicarage, and so pass out of our story.

Their fate does not concern us, for this reason--men with a narrow
horizon and no wings must accept all apparent disproportions between
cause and effect. A railway collision has other results besides
wrecking an ant-hill, but the wise ants do not pursue these in the
Insurance Reports. So it only concerns us that the destruction of the
schooner led in time to a lovers' difference between Ruby and young
Zeb--two young people of no eminence outside of these pages. And, as a
matter of fact, her crew had less to do with this than her cargo.

She had been expressly built by Messrs. Taggs & Co., a London firm, in
reality as a privateer (which explains her raking masts), but ostensibly
for the Portugal trade; and was homeward bound from Lisbon to the
Thames, with a cargo of red wine and chestnuts. At Falmouth, where she
had run in for a couple of days, on account of a damaged rudder, the
captain paid off his extra hands, foreseeing no difficulty in the voyage
up Channel. She had not, however, left Falmouth harbour three hours
before she met with a gale that started her steering-gear afresh.
To put back in the teeth of such weather was hopeless; and the attempt
to run before it ended as we know.


When Ruby looked up, after the crash, and saw her friends running along
the headland to catch a glimpse of the wreck, her anger returned.
She stood for twenty minutes at least, watching them; then, pulling her