eight to take
the leap until, tearing free her hold, he had lifted her in his arms and
skidded down the side.

There was no confusion now. The sea had never seemed more peaceful.
Heads were bobbing merrily in the water, as though in for a pleasure
swim; beyond them lay the steamer, abjectly motionless--looking like a
monster which might have arisen from the deeps to bask upon the surface.
Jeb was wondering if he should not yet swim back and try to climb
aboard, when the great hulk swayed--gently at first, this way and that;
then, as if tender hands were lowering it into a grave, it slowly began
to sink.

At this point the prevailing quiet was shattered by a hell of sounds.
Had a score of nearby thunder storms been raging and a hundred frame
houses ruthlessly been crushed between two great forces, their combined
noises might have been compared to those issuing from the stricken
vessel as she took her plunge--until the closing waters choked them into
a kind of gurgling silence, as though a bellowing giant were being
drowned instead of a thing of splintering wood and groaning steel.

Dazed as Jeb was, he saw a mountain-high wave of seething foam rise from
the grave and roar toward him with the speed of unchecked horses.
Tossing like jack-straws on its crest were bunks, in part or whole,
chairs, planking, and debris of all descriptions. As it drew near he
took a deep breath and crossed his arms to protect his face. The next
second it was atop of him.

An eternity seemed to pass before he came up--an eternity during which
he rolled over and over in a seething green wilderness. When, choked and
coughing, he gained the surface he felt that it had been changed into
another world. The former peace of waters scarcely disturbed by gentle
waves whereon heads had bobbed in apparent merriment, the listed ship
that had lain sleeping on the skyline, were gone; in their stead was a
great waste of hissing bubbles which burst about his face and blinded
him. The surface had become an ocean of hisses--as though the submarine,
agent of that nation which generates hate, had by some wicked magic
changed the water with its hatred, too! And in the midst of this
confusion a chorus of three hundred passionate voices wailed their
anguish to a passive God; for, while these human beings had been whole
before, there were now many whom the sweeping wreckage had torn--some
with fractured bones, some disembowled, some mercifully dead! Never
could Je