to fracture, as a prelude to its downfall and destruction, he boldly sped us, when the thing was at all practicable, straight in the teeth of the gap, and as it proceeded to widen, we shot through it, with the surf leaping and tossing on either hand high above our heads.  This stroke could have been possible only to a steersman possessed of herculean strength, combined with the rarest daring and coolness; and, as the result of these qualities, it was exceedingly effective.  It lessened the danger of our being capsized almost entirely.  Indeed, the sole mishap that was threatened by so doing, was the liability to being swamped by the falling fragments of the breakers; but this peril old Bill declared we might safely trust he would also avert.  It being the nature of humanity to experience a mood of high exaltation with the surmounting of any serious obstacle, we now worked our way with minds light and cheery, and with all thoughts of anything like fatigue completely forgotten.  Though our course was on the whole a zigzag one, and though we certainly met with one or two serious rebuffs, we were constantly gaining headway, and in something over an hour forced the last line of the breakers, and stemmed what on ordinary occasions would have been simply the blue body of the Atlantic.  But even here a huge commotion was reigning, though our progress was far less tedious than it had previously been; and with about another hour’s labor we were alongside the wreck, and had climbed to her deck.

The plight of the vessel was mournful enough.  She had evidently been built for a three-masted schooner, but, as Bill had observed when he first obtained a view of her, everything about her was well-nigh gone save her hull.  Her bulwarks had been thoroughly crushed, and so the sea had successively torn away her boats, shivered her galley and wheelhouse, and filled her cabin and hold.  Her masts were also destroyed, the fore and mizzen masts being carried away from their steppings, and the main-mast broken completely in twain just above the cross-trees.  But a sight still more desolate, as well as harrowing, yet awaited us, as, in overhauling the sail-encumbered shrouds of the partially standing mast, we discovered several ice-bound figures rigidly hanging therein, which, being cut away and lowered to our boat, proved to be the body of a negro perfectly stark and dead, and three most pitiable white sailors, whose life was so far extinguished that they could neither move hand nor foot, nor utter more than the feeblest moans.

When we had covered the face of the dead and sheltered the well-nigh dead as best we could in the bottom of our boat, of course our chief thought was to return to the shore as swiftly as possible.  But on this head there was no call to entertain the smallest solicitude; for after old Bill, from a motive that we could not yet name, had ‘stepped’ a mast through one of the foremost thwarts of the boat, and rigged a sail all ready to be spread, we cast off from the