es bruised his hands
against them. At any rate he got on shore alive, and, securing his
rope, made his way over the moors to the town, and summoned his
captain, who was asleep in his own house. They returned at once to the
spot, found the line still fast, and the rest of the crew, four in
number, lowered the whaleboat, and were pulled to shore by the rope,
landing safely before daybreak.

When I saw the vessel next morning, she lay in a little cove, stern on,
not wholly out of water,--steady and upright as in a dry-dock, with no
sign of serious injury, except that the rudder was gone. She did not
seem like a wreck; the men were the wrecks. As they lay among the
rocks, bare or tattered, scarcely able to move, waiting for low tide to
go on board the vessel, it was like a scene after a battle. They
appeared too inert, poor fellows, to do anything but yearn toward the
sun. When they changed position for shelter, from time to time, they
crept along the rocks, instead of walking. They were like the little
floating sprays of sea-weed, when you take them from the water and they
become a mere mass of pulp in your hand. Martin shared in the general
exhaustion, and no wonder; but he told his story very simply, and
showed me where he had landed. The feat seemed to me then, and has
always seemed, almost incredible, even for an expert swimmer. He thus
summed up the motives for his action: "I thought that God was first,
and I was next, and if I did the best I could, no man could do more
than that; so I jumped overboard." It is pleasant to add, that, though
a poor man, he utterly declined one of those small donations of money
by which we Anglo-Saxons are wont clumsily to express our personal
enthusiasms; and I think I appreciated his whole action the more for
its coming just at the close of a war during which so many had readily
accepted their award of praise or pay for acts of less intrinsic daring
than his.

Stir the fire, Annie, with yonder broken fragment of a flag-staff; its
truck is still remaining, though the flag is gone, and every nation
might claim it. As you stir, the burning brands evince a remembrance of
their sea-lost life, the sparks drift away like foam-flakes, the flames
wave and flap like sails, and the wail of the chimney sings a second
shipwreck. As the tiny scintillations gleam and scatter and vanish in
the soot of the chimney-wall, instead of "There goes the parson, and
there goes the clerk," it must be the capt