ve themselves slowly
out of the water close alongside him until the keel, for a length of
some thirty feet, was exposed; then the huge hull began to slide forward
and away from him with an ever-quickening motion until, with a rush, a
weird whistling of air escaping from the ship's interior that mingled
horribly with the shrieks of those on deck, and a dull booming as the
decks were burst up, the fabric plunged headlong and was gone!

Then came the deadly suction of the sinking ship; the waters poured from
all round, like a raging torrent, into the swirling hollow where the
craft had been; and as Leslie felt himself caught and dragged
irresistibly toward the vortex he instinctively drew a deep breath,
filling his lungs to their utmost capacity with air in readiness for the
long submergence that he knew was coming.

Another moment and it had come; the tumbling waters had closed over him,
and he felt himself being dragged down, down, down, and whirled
helplessly hither and thither as he clung resolutely to his life-buoy.
As he continued to descend he was constantly reminded that he was not
alone in this frightful plunge into the depths; he several times came
into more or less violent contact with objects, some at least of which
were certainly struggling human beings like himself. Once he felt
himself strongly clutched by the hair for a moment, but the swirl of the
water almost immediately tore him free again. And still that awful,
implacable downward drag continued, until he began to wonder dreamily
whether he would ever return to the surface alive, or whether, after
all, deliverance from his wretchedness--which in some inexplicable way
already seemed much less poignant to him--was coming to him down there
in those black depths. The pressure upon his body was rapidly becoming
unendurable; the air was being forced from his lungs; he was
suffocating! Involuntarily he began to struggle, throwing out his arms
and legs instinctively in a powerful effort to return to the surface.
Then, in a moment, he lost all consciousness of his dreadful situation
and found himself once more back among the scenes of his childhood, a
multitude of trivial and long-forgotten incidents recurring to his
memory with inconceivable rapidity. He was a dying man; the agony of
drowning was over, and he had entered upon that curious phase of
retrospection that most drowning people experience, and that so
pleasantly precedes that form of dissolution.