is gros navir's sont arrives
Charges d'avoin', charges de ble.
Charges d'avoin', charges de ble:
Trois dam's s'en vont les marchander."

And so on through many verses, with a heartiness that was a good
antidote to melancholy, even though it was no specific for a shipwreck.
It played its part, however; and when Jean Jacques finished it, he
plunged into that other outburst of the habitant's gay spirits, 'Bal
chez Boule':

"Bal chez Boule, bal chez Boule,
The vespers o'er, we'll away to that;
With our hearts so light, and our feet so gay,
We'll dance to the tune of 'The Cardinal's Hat'
The better the deed, the better the day
Bal chez Boule, bal chez Boule!"

And while Jean Jacques worked "like a little French pony," as they say
in Canada of every man with the courage to do hard things in him, he
did not stop to think that the scanty life-belts had all been taken,
and that he was a very poor swimmer indeed: for, as a child, he had been
subject to cramp, and so had made the Beau Cheval River less his friend
than would have been useful now.

He realized it, however, soon after daybreak, when, within a few hundred
yards of the shores of Gaspe, to which the good Basque captain had been
slowly driving the Antoine all night, there came the cry, "All hands
on deck!" and "Lower the boats!" for the Antoine's time had come, and
within a hand-reach of shore almost she found the end of her rickety
life. Not more than three-fourths of the passengers and crew were got
into the boats. Jean Jacques was not one of these; but he saw Carmen
Dolores and her father safely bestowed, though in different boats. To
the girl's appeal to him to come he gave a nod of assent, and said he
would get in at the last moment; but this he did not do, pushing into
the boat instead a crying lad of fifteen, who said he was afraid to die.

So it was that Jean Jacques took to the water side by side with the
Basque captain, when the Antoine groaned and shook, and then grew still,
and presently, with some dignity, dipped her nose into the shallow sea
and went down.

"The rest of the story to-morrow," Jean Jacques had said when the vessel
struck the iceberg the night before; and so it was.

The boat in which Carmen had been placed was swamped not far from shore,
but she managed to lay hold of a piece of drifting wreckage, and began
to fight steadily and easily landward. Presently s