under a hatchway, and the water poured from above,
almost drowning me. This was the beginning of a
storm which raged for days, and I still have of it a
confused memory, a sort of nightmare, in which
strange horrors figure, and which to this day haunts
me at intervals when I am on the sea. The thing
that stands out most strongly during that period is
the white face of my mother, ill in her berth. We
were with five hundred emigrants on the lowest
deck of the ship but one, and as the storm grew
wilder an unreasoning terror filled our fellow-pas-
sengers. Too ill to protect her helpless brood, my
mother saw us carried away from her for hours at a
time, on the crests of waves of panic that sometimes
approached her and sometimes receded, as they
swept through the black hole in which we found our-
selves when the hatches were nailed down. No mad-
house, I am sure, could throw more hideous pictures
on the screen of life than those which met our childish
eyes during the appalling three days of the storm.
Our one comfort was the knowledge that our mother
was not afraid. She was desperately ill, but when
we were able to reach her, to cling close to her for a
blessed interval, she was still the sure refuge she had
always been.

On the second day the masts went down, and on
the third day the disabled ship, which now had
sprung a leak and was rolling helplessly in the
trough of the sea, was rescued by another ship and