“Is that the steam-carrier I have heard of?  How fearful!  It makes me want to shut my eyes.”

To Marion Dearsley’s unaccustomed sight the lurching of the carrier was indeed awful, and she might well wonder, as I once did, how any boat ever got away safely.  I have often told the public about that frantic scene alongside the steamers, but words are only a poor medium, for not Hugo, nor even Clark Russell, the matchless, could give a fair idea of that daily survival of danger, and recklessness, and almost insane audacity.  The skipper was used to put in his word pretty freely on all occasions, for Blair’s men were not drilled in the style of ordinary yachtsmen.  Freeman, like all of the schooner’s crew, had been a fisherman, and he grinned with pleasing humour when he heard the young lady’s innocent questions.

“Bless you, Miss, that’s nothing.  See ’em go in winter when you can’t see the top of the steamboat’s mast as she gets behind a sea.  Many and many’s the one I’ve seen go.  They’re used to it, but I once seen a genelman fainthe was weak, poor fellow—­and we took aboard a dose of water that left us half-full.  He would come at any risk, and when we histed him up on the cutter’s deck, and he comes to, he shudders and he says, ‘That is too horrible.  Am I a-dreaming?’ But it’s all use, Miss.  Even when some poor fellows is drowned, the men do all they can; and if they fail, they forget next day.”

“Could you edge us towards the cutter, skipper?” said Fullerton.

“Oh, yes.  Bear up for the carrier, Bill; mind this fellow coming down.”

The beautiful yacht was soon well under the steamer’s lee, and the ladies watched with dazed curiosity the work of the tattered, filthy, greasy mob who bounded, and strained, and performed their prodigies of skill on the thofts and gunwales of the little boats.  Life and limb seemed to be not worth caring for; men fairly hurled themselves from the steamer into the boats, quite careless as to whether they landed on hands or feet, or anyhow.  Fullerton exclaimed—­

“Just to think that of all those splendid, plucky smacksmen, we haven’t got one yet!  I’ve been using the glass, and can’t see a face that I know.  How can we?  We haven’t funds, and we cannot send vessels out.”

Miss Dearsley’s education was being rapidly completed.  Her strong, quick intelligence was catching the significance of everything she saw.  The smack with the lost mainsail was drawing near, and the doctor was ready to go, when a boat with four men came within safe distance of the schooner’s side.

“Can you give us any assistance, sir?  Our mate’s badly wounded—­seems to a’ lost his senses like, and don’t understand.”

A deadly pale man was stretched limply on the top of a pile of fish-boxes.  Mrs. Walton said—­

“Pray take us away—­we cannot bear the sight.”

And indeed Marion Dearsley was as pale as the poor blood-smeared fisherman.  Ferrier coolly waited and helped Tom and Fullerton to hoist the senseless, mangled mortal on deck.  The crew did all they could to keep the boat steady, but after every care the miserable sufferer fell at last with a sudden jerk across the schooner’s rail.  He was too weak to moan.