384 
UNLOOKED-FOR SALVATION, 
time to them, also, should draw to a close. All this it 
meant; and horror, and despair, and approaching dissolu- 
tion, gathered around us. 
“Starboard it is, sir!” said the ready helmsman ; and 
as he spoke the wheel turned evenly under his nervous 
grasp, and the old ship’s head dropped slowly off. Bodily, 
hopelessly, broadside on, she now drifted toward the last 
struggle. How quickly those few seconds glide, — small 
seconds of time, but awful, awful taxes upon the mind’s 
future stability ! Men live through past ages in moments 
like those. The strained and labouring brain burns with 
a fire that whitens the locks of youth, or sows the seeds 
of future disease, through sheer intensity of thought. 
It is come ! Men cease to breathe, and, with half-closed 
eyes and muscles of iron, grasp a swinging rope or near 
belaying-pin with unconscious pow'er ! 
What? The reef! Where is it? A merciful Beiim 
o 
smiled upon liis helpless creatures and strengthened their 
broken reed in that moment of their dire extremity. Our 
eyes had deceived us. Eyes whose business it had been 
for years to discover the unknown reef, and to distinguish 
between that and the deceptive tide-rip, had failed for 
once. -ZVo reef existed. It was the peculiar formation of 
the land, combined with the fearful velocity of the rush- 
ing ocean, which created a tide-rip that might well have 
deceived a thousand eyes. And, as we drifted wildly over 
the boiling space into the fathomless waters beyond,” 
man’s failing eye, which had been dry and hard and burn- 
ing while death held out his fleshless arms, softened with 
cooling moisture, until those shapeless piles of towering 
rock grew dim and undefined in their uncertain vision. 
