and wading by turns, to the further sandbar, where the water is
shallow enough to stand in,--if you know how to jump when the
breaker comes.

But Feliu, nearing the flooded shell-bank, watches the white
flashings,--knows when the time comes to keep flat and take a
long, long breath. One heavy volleying of foam,--darkness and
hissing as of a steam-burst; a vibrant lifting up; a rush into
light,--and again the volleying and the seething darkness. Once
more,--and the fight is won! He feels the upcoming chill of
deeper water,--sees before him the green quaking of unbroken
swells,--and far beyond him Mateo leaping on the bar,--and beside
him, almost within arm's reach, a great billiard-table swaying,
and a dead woman clinging there, and ... the child.

A moment more, and Feliu has lifted himself beside the waifs ...
How fast the dead woman clings, as if with the one power which is
strong as death,--the desperate force of love! Not in vain; for
the frail creature bound to the mother's corpse with a silken
scarf has still the strength to cry out:--"Maman! maman!" But
time is life now; and the tiny hands must be pulled away from the
fair dead neck, and the scarf taken to bind the infant firmly to
Feliu's broad shoulders,--quickly, roughly; for the ebb will not
wait ...

And now Feliu has a burden; but his style of swimming has totally
changed;--he rises from the water like a Triton, and his powerful
arms seem to spin in circles, like the spokes of a flying wheel.
For now is the wrestle indeed!--after each passing swell comes a
prodigious pulling from beneath,--the sea clutching for its prey.