“Won’t some one lend you a glass, Georgie?” said mother.

“Of course they will!” I cried,—­for, you see, I hadn’t a wit of my own,—­and I ran out.

There’s a glass behind every door in the street, you should know, and there’s no day in the year that you’ll go by and not see one stretching from some roof where the heart of the house is out on the sea.  Oh, sometimes I think all the romance of the town is clustered down here on the Flats and written in pale cheeks and starting eyes.  But what’s the use?  After one winter, one, I gave mine away, and never got another.  It’s just an emblem of despair.  Look, and look again, and look till your soul sinks, and the thing you want never crosses it; but you’re down in the kitchen stirring a porridge, or you’re off at a neighbor’s asking the news, and somebody shouts at you round the corner, and there, black and dirty and dearer than gold, she lies between the piers.

All the world was up on their house-tops spying, that morning, but there was nobody would keep their glass while I had none; so I went back armed, and part of it all I saw, and part of it father told me.

I waited till I thought they were ’most across, and then I rubbed the lens.  At first I saw nothing, and I began to quake with a greater fear than any that had yet taken root in me.  But with the next moment there they were, pulling close up.  I shut my eyes for a flash with some kind of a prayer that was most like an imprecation, and when I looked again they had dashed over and dashed over, taking the rise of the long roll, and were in the midst of the South Breaker.  O God! that terrible South Breaker!  The oars bent lithe as willow-switches, a moment they skimmed on the caps, a moment were hid in the snow of the spray.  Dan, red-shirted, still stood there, his whole soul on the aim before him, like that of some leaper flying through the air; he swayed to the stroke, he bowed, he rose, perfectly balanced, and flexile as the wave.  The boat behaved beneath their hands like a live creature:  she bounded so that you almost saw the light under her; her whole steal lifted itself slowly out of the water, caught the back of a roller and rode over upon the next; the very things that came rushing in with their white rage to devour her bent their necks and bore her up like a bubble.  Constantly she drew nearer that dark and shattered heap up to which the fierce surf raced, and over which it leaped.  And there all the time, all the time, they had been clinging, far out on the bowsprit, those two figures, her arms close-knit about him, he clasping her with one, the other twisted in the hawser, whose harsh thrilling must have filled their ears like an organ-note as it swung them to and fro,—­clinging to life,—­clinging to each other more than to life.  The wreck scarcely heaved with the stoutest blow of the tremendous surge; here and there, only, a plank shivered off and was bowled on and thrown high upon the beach beside fragments