wall, and charging with the level velocity of a horse regiment. The
doctor closed his eyes and thought, "Now for the grand secret." Then
came the immense pressure--the convulsive straining, the failing light,
the noise in the ears. First the young man found himself crushed under
some strangling incubus; then, with a shrieking gasp, he was in the
upper air. But he was under a hamper of ropes that strung him down as if
he were in a coop, and his dulled senses failed for a moment to tell
what ailed him. At last, after seconds that seemed like ages, it dawned
on him; the masts had snapped like carrots, both were over the side, and
the hulk was only a half-sunken plaything for the seas to hurl hither
and thither. Larmor? Gone! How long? These things chased each other
through his dim mind; he slipped his arm out and crept clear; then a
perception struck him with the force of a material thing; a return wave
leaped up with a slow, spent lunge on the starboard side, and a black
something--wreckage? No. A shudder of the torn nerves told the young man
what it was. He slid desperately over and made his clutch; the great
backwash seemed as though it would tear his arm out of the socket, but
he hung on, and presently a lucky lift enabled him to haul Larmor on
board! All this passed in a few lying instants, but centuries---
aeons--could not count its length in the anguish-stricken human soul.

I once knew a sailor who was washed through a port in a Biscay gale; the
return sea flung him on board again. I asked, "What did you think?"

He answered, "I thought, 'I'm overboard.'"

"And when you touched deck again, what did you think?"

"I thought, 'Blowed if I'm not aboard again.'"