12. But as they fly southward warm life thrills them, and they drop their loads of sleet and snow, and meet their young live sisters from the south, and greet them with flash and thunder-peal. Men call them the southwest wind, those air-mothers; and their ghosts, the north-east trade; and value them, and rightly, because they bear the traders out and back across the sea. Charles Kingsley.

Ν

XCIX. THE TEMPEST.

IN the evening, I started, in the Yarmouth 1 mail-coach, down the road I had traversed under so many vicissitudes. "Don't you think that," I asked the coachman, in the first stage out of London," a very remarkable sky? I don't remember to have seen one like it."

"That's

2. "Nor Inot equal to it," he replied. wind, sir. There 'll. be mischief done at sea, I expect, before long."

3. It was a murky confusion of flying clouds, tossed up into the most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if she had lost her way and were frightened. There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then with an extraordinary great sound. But as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely overspreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow, harder and harder.

4. It still increased, until our horses could scarcely face the wind, and we were often in serious apprehension that the coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before this storm, like showers of steel; and, at 1 Yarmouth, England.

those times, when there was any shelter of trees or lee walls to be got, we were fain to stop, in sheer impossibility of continuing the journey. As we struggled on, nearer and nearer to the sea, from which this mighty wind was blowing dead on shore,1 its force became more and more terrific.

5. Long before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips, and showered salt rain upon us. The water was out, over miles and miles of the flat country adjacent to Yarmouth, and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and had its stress of little breakers setting heavily towards us. When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.

6. When, at last, we got into the town, the people came out to their doors, all aslant, and with streaming hair, making a wonder of the mail that had come through such a night. Coming near the beach, I saw, not only the boatmen, but half the people of the town, lurking behind buildings; some, now and then, braving the fury of the storm to look away to sea, and blown sheer out of their course in trying to get, zigzag, back.

7. Joining these groups, I found bewailing women whose husbands were away in herring or oyster boats, which there was too much reason to think might have foundered before they could run in anywhere for safety. Grizzled old sailors were among the people, shaking their heads as they looked from water to sky, and muttering to one another; ship-owners, excited and uneasy; children, huddling together and peering into older faces; even stout mariners, disturbed and anxious, leveling their glasses at the sea from behind places of shelter, as if they were surveying an enemy.

1 Directly towards the shore.

8. The tremendous sea itself, when I could find sufficient pause to look at it, in the agitation of the blinding wind, the flying stones and sand, and the awful noise, confounded me. As the high watery walls came rolling in, and, at their highest, tumbled into surf, they looked as if the least would engulf the town. As the receding wave swept back with a hoarse roar, it seemed to scoop out deep caves in the beach, as if its purpose were to undermine the earth. When some white-headed billows thundered on, and dashed themselves to pieces before they reached the land, every fragment of the late whole seemed possessed by the full might of its wrath, rushing to be gathered to the composition of another monster.

9. Undulating hills were changed to valleys, undulating valleys (with a solitary storm-bird sometimes skimming through them) were lifted up to hills; masses of water shivered and shook the beach with a booming sound; every shape tumultuously rolled on, as soon as made, to change its shape and place, and beat another shape and place away; the ideal shore on the horizon, with its towers and buildings, rose and fell; the clouds flew fast and thick; I seemed to see a rending and upheaving of all

nature.

10. In the difficulty of hearing anything but wind and waves, and in the crowd, and the unspeakable confusion, and my first breathless efforts to stand against the weather, I was so confused that I looked out to sea for the wreck, and saw nothing but the foaming heads of the great waves. A half-dressed boatman, standing next me, pointed with his bare arm (a tattooed arrow on it, pointing in the same direction) to the left. Then, O great Heaven, I saw it, close in upon us!

11. One mast was broken short off, six or eight feet from the deck, and lay over the side, entangled in a maze of sail and rigging; and all that ruin, as the ship rolled

and beat which she did without a moment's pause, and with a violence quite inconceivable-beat the side as if it would stave it in. Some efforts were even then being made to cut this portion of the wreck away; for, as the ship, which was broadside on, turned towards us in her rolling, I plainly descried her people at work with axes, especially one active figure with long curling hair, conspicuous among the rest.

12. But a great cry, which was audible even above the wind and water, rose from the shore at this moment; the sea, sweeping over the rolling wreck, made a clean breach, and carried men, spars, casks, planks, bulwarks, — heaps of such toys, into the boiling surge. The second mast was yet standing, with the rags of a rent sail, and a wild confusion of broken cordage flapping to and fro. The ship had struck once, the same boatman hoarsely said in my ear, and then lifted in and struck again.

13. As he spoke, there was another great cry of pity from the beach; four men arose with the wreck out of the deep, clinging to the rigging of the remaining mast ; uppermost, the active figure with the curling hair. There was a bell on board; and, as the ship rolled and dashed, like a desperate creature driven mad, now showing us the whole sweep of her deck, as she turned on her beam-ends towards the shore, now, nothing but her keel, as she sprung wildly over and turned towards the sea, the bell rang; and its sound, the knell of those unhappy men, was borne towards us on the wind.

Two men

14. Again, we lost her, and again, she rose. were gone. The agony on shore increased. Men groaned, and clasped their hands, women shrieked, and turned away their faces. Some ran wildly up and down along the beach, crying for help where no help could be. I found myself one of these, frantically imploring a knot of sailors whom I knew, not to let those two lost creatures perish

before our eyes, when I noticed that some new sensation moved the people on the beach, and saw them part, and Ham come breaking through them to the front.

15. I ran to him, held him back with both arms, and implored the men with whom I had been speaking not to listen to him, not to do murder, not to let him stir from off that sand! Another cry arose on shore, and, looking to the wreck, we saw the cruel sail with blow on blow, beat off the lower of the two men, and fly up in triumph round the active figure left alone upon the mast.

16. Against such a sight, and against such determination as that of the calmly desperate man, I might as hopefully have entreated the wind. "Mas'r Davy," he said, cheerily grasping me by both hands, "if my time is come, 'tis come. If 'tain't, I'll bide it. Lord above bless you, and bless all! Mates, make me ready! I'm a-going off!"

17. I don't know what I answered, or what they rejoined; but I saw hurry on the beach, and men running with ropes from a capstan that was there, and penetrat-ing into a circle of figures that hid him from me. Then I saw him standing alone, in a seaman's frock and trousers, a rope in his hand, or slung to his wrist; another round his body, and several of the best men, holding, at a little distance, to the latter, which he laid out himself, slack upon the shore, at his feet.

18. Ham watched the sea, standing alone, with the silence of suspended breath behind him, and the storm before, until there was a great retiring wave, when, with a backward glance at those who held the rope which was made fast round his body, he dashed in after it, and, in a moment, was buffeting with the water. Now, he made for the wreck, rising with the hills, falling with the valleys, lost beneath the rugged foam, borne in towards the shore, borne on towards the ship, striving hard and valiantly.