ith
a rush and a roar we plunged into the tempest, and all was blackness!

It seemed to me as if that first plunge was to be the last for the
gallant boat and all in her. The bows under which we crouched, clinging
for dear life to a ring on the floor, were completely submerged. The
water rushed over us and around us, nearly stunning us with its violence
and deafening us with its noise.

But presently we rose suddenly, and the boat shot up till it seemed to
stand on end, so that, where we sat, we could see every inch of it from
stem to stern, and the dim outline of Kingstairs jetty behind. At the
same moment the ten oars dropped into their rowlocks, the coxswain, with
his sou'-wester pulled down tight on his head, and a hand raised to
screen his eyes from the sleet, shouted something--the boat soared
wildly up the wave, and once again all was darkness for us.

How the brave boat ever got through that first half-mile of surf is a
mystery to me. Every wave seemed as though it would pitch it like a
plaything across to the next. Now we shot up till we looked down on the
coxswain below us as from the top of a mast, and next instant we looked
up at him till it seemed a marvel how he held to his place, and did not
drop on to us. All the while the men tugged doggedly at the oars,
heeding neither the waves that broke over them and flooded the boat, nor
the surf that often nearly knocked the oars from their hands.

And what of Jack and me? We crouched there, close together, clutching
fast at the friendly ring, looking out in mute terror on to this fearful
scene, too stupefied to speak, or move, or almost to think. Had any one
seen us? or had the hand which drove me down at the launch saved me from
my danger by accident? I began to think this must be so, when the man
nearest us, whom even in his cork jacket and sou'-wester I recognised as
the hero of the shark story in the "look-out," turned towards us.

He was not one of the rowers, but had been busily drawing in and coiling
a line close beside us during those first terrific plunges of the boat
after she had taken the water. But now he turned hurriedly to where we
sat, and without a word seized me roughly by the arm and drew me to my
feet. I made sure I was to be cast overboard like Jonah into that
fearful sea. But no. All he did was to throw a cork jacket round me,
and then thrust me down again to my old place, just as a great wave
broke over the prows and seemed