heavy, and crushes; it is also sharp, and sometimes cuts cruelly and
deeply. But in the midst of her amazing grief she found time to call
some cheering words across to her husband: "Keep your heart up, lad, and
think of me and the children as loves you." He, poor soul, looked
thunder at his sergeant, and raged and swore; but he was a unit in a
mass--he kicked against the pricks, and he knew it.

At last the gangway was removed, and a kind of quietness fell upon the
crowd, waiting for the next harrowing sensation. It came in a
succession of those minute incidents that burn themselves into the
memory of people whose nerves are on the rack. The splash of a hawser
into the dock; the deep notes of the engine-room telegraph, and the
clicking reply upon the bridge; the spinning of the wheel as a
quartermaster tests the steering engine; the clack and spit of winches,
and finally the thrilling shout of the foghorn, whose echo leaves you
trembling--all these things have a painful significance, and they bite
and grip into the heart. As the ship began to move a band on the
shade-deck struck up "Auld Lang Syne," and immediately the floodgates
were unlocked. Tears started again into bitterly dry eyes, handkerchiefs
were waved, people shouted, sang snatches of song--everyone made a sound
of some kind, and contributed to the great unrestrained noise of human
beings in distress and excitement. Above it all rose the hooting of
foghorns and sirens, while the band made its noise too--thump and throb
of drums, scream of pipes, and red-hot flare of brass instruments.
Sea-birds, seeing the ship about to depart, flapped and hovered about it
by the score, adding their shrill cries to the tumult; and high on his
flying-bridge stood the captain, shifting his telegraph from "stand by"
to "ahead," holding up or moving his hand, but not uttering his voice.
It was a striking picture, in which he stood as an image of a Fate by
which all men were for the moment helplessly crushed down.

It was at this moment that something happened which I, for one, had been
expecting. One of the many men who were perched in the rigging or
outside the rails lost his hold, and in the same second was wriggling in
the water. It conveys some idea of the pitch to which the crowd was
strung up to say that the noise did not increase and hardly changed its
character. I suppose people turned from cheering to shouting, but the
big sound was still the same, and since the bands-