poop, sat down abruptly,--the crew likewise; not, however, before she had
heeled to the scuppers, and a half-bucket of iced water had run it.
Head-hunters were mere daily episodes in Grits's existence, but water...
He muttered something in cockney that sounded like a prayer.... The wind
was rapidly driving us toward the middle of the pond, and something cold
and ticklish was seeping through the seats of our trousers. We sat like
statues....

The bright scene etched itself in my memory--the bare brown slopes with
which the pond was bordered, the Irish shanties, the clothes-lines with
red flannel shirts snapping in the biting wind; Nancy motionless on the
bank; the group behind her, silent now, impressed in spite of itself at
the sight of our intrepidity.

The Petrel was sailing stern first.... Would any of us, indeed, ever see
home again? I thought of my father's wrath turned to sorrow because he
had refused to gratify a son's natural wish and present him with a real
rowboat.... Out of the corners of our eyes we watched the water creeping
around the gunwale, and the very muddiness of it seemed to enhance its
coldness, to make the horrors of its depths more mysterious and hideous.
The voice of Grits startled us.

"O Gawd," he was saying, "we're a-going to sink, and I carn't swim! The
blarsted tar's give way back here."

"Is she leaking?" I cried.

"She's a-filling up like a bath tub," he lamented.

Slowly but perceptibly, in truth, the bow was rising, and above the