e so frequently over the vessel that the pumps could scarcely keep
her afloat; and at length, while it was yet dark, though verging toward
the dawn, the sailors abandoned their task of working at those pumps.
Vainly did the captain endeavor to exercise his authority--vainly did
Wagner hold out menaces and promises by turns; death seemed imminent,
and yet those men, who felt that they were hovering on the verge of
destruction, flew madly to the wine-stores.

Then commenced a scene of the wildest disorder amidst those desperate
men; and even the captain himself, perceiving that they could laugh, and
shout, and sing, in the delirium of intoxication, rushed from the side
of Wagner and joined the rest. It was dreadful to hear the obscene jest,
the ribald song, and the reckless execration, sent forth from the cabin,
as if in answer to the awful voices in which Nature was then speaking to
the world. But scarcely had a faint gleam appeared in the orient
sky--not quite a gleam, but a mitigation of the intenseness of the
night--when a tremendous wave--a colossus amongst giants--broke over the
ill-fated ship, while a terrible crash of timber was for a moment heard
in unison with the appalling din of the whelming billows. Wagner was the
only soul on deck at that instant: but the fury of the waters tore him
away from the bulwark to which he had been clinging, and he became
insensible.

When he awoke from the stupor into which he had been plunged, it was
still dusk, and the roar of the ocean sounded in his ears with deafening
din.

But he was on land, though where he knew not. Rising from the sand on
which he had been cast, he beheld the billows breaking on the shore at
the distance of only a few paces; and he retreated further from their
reach. Then he sat down, with his face toward the east, anxiously
awaiting the appearance of the morn that he might ascertain the nature
and the aspect of the land on which he had been cast. By degrees the
glimmering which had already subdued the blackness of night into the
less profound obscurity of duskiness, grew stronger; and a yellow
luster, as of a far-distant conflagration, seemed to struggle against a
thick fog. Then a faint roseate streak tinged the eastern horizon,
growing gradually deeper in hue, and spreading higher and wider--the
harbinger of sunrise; while, simultaneously, the features of the land on
which Wagner was thrown began to develop themselves like specters
stealing out of c