The old man, accustomed to her fits of fixed melancholy, looked down under her bonnet, to see whether she was “past,” as he called it.  By the moonlight he could see her great eyes steady and wide open.  She motioned him away, half impatiently, and then sprang to her feet with a scream.

“A man!  A man!  Save him!”

As she spoke, a huge wave rolled in, and shot up the sloping end of the point in a broad sheet of foam.

And out of it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure.  He looked wildly up, and round, and then his head dropped again on his breast; and he lay clinging with outspread arms, like Homer’s polypus in the Odyssey, as the wave drained back, in a thousand roaring cataracts, over the edge of the rock.

“Save him!” shrieked she again, as twenty men rushed forward—­and stopped short.  The man was fully thirty yards from them:  but close to him, between them and him, stretched a long ghastly crack, some ten feet wide, cutting the point across.  All knew it:  its slippery edge, its polished upright sides, the seething cauldrons within it; and knew, too, that the next wave would boil up from it in a hundred jets, and suck in the strongest to his doom, to fall, with brains dashed out, into a chasm from which was no return.

Ere they could nerve themselves for action, the wave had come.  Up the slope it went, one half of it burying the wretched mariner, and fell over into the chasm.  The other half rushed up the chasm itself, and spouted forth again to the moonlight in columns of snow, in time to meet the wave from which it had just parted, as it fell from above; and then the two boiled up, and round, and over, and swirled along the smooth rock to their very feet.

The schoolmistress took one long look; and as the wave retired, rushed after it to the very brink of the chasm, and flung herself on her knees.

“She’s mazed!”

“No, she’s not!” almost screamed old Willis, in mingled pride and terror, as he rushed after her.  “The wave has carried him across the crack and she’s got him!” And he sprang upon her, and caught her round the waist.

“Now, if you be men!” shouted he, as the rest hurried down.

“Now, if you be men; before the next wave comes!” shouted Big Jan.  “Hands together, and make a line!” And he took a grip with one hand of the old man’s waistband, and held out the other for who would to seize.

Who took it?  Frank Headley, the curate, who had been watching all sadly apart, longing to do something which no one could mistake.

“Be you man enough?” asked big Jan doubtfully.

“Try,” said Frank.

“Really, you ben’t, sir,” said Jan, civilly enough.  “Means no offence, sir; your heart’s stout enough, I see; but you don’t know what’ll be.”  And he caught the hand of a huge fellow next him, while Frank shrank sadly back into the darkness.

Strong hand after hand was clasped, and strong knee after knee dropped almost to the rock, to meet the coming rush of water; and all who knew their business took a long breath,—­they might have need of one.