The sou’-wester set in with a whirlwind.  Shipwrecked men have never any but rough helpers.  The Matutina was dragged rapidly out to sea by the remnant of her rigging—­like a dead woman trailed by the hair.  It was like the enfranchisement granted by Tiberius, at the price of violation.

The wind treated with brutality those whom it saved; it rendered service with fury; it was help without pity.

The wreck was breaking up under the severity of its deliverers.

Hailstones, big and hard enough to charge a blunderbuss, smote the vessel; at every rotation of the waves these hailstones rolled about the deck like marbles.  The hooker, whose deck was almost flush with the water, was being beaten out of shape by the rolling masses of water and its sheets of spray.  On board it each man was for himself.

They clung on as best they could.  As each sea swept over them, it was with a sense of surprise they saw that all were still there.  Several had their faces torn by splinters.

Happily despair has stout hands.  In terror a child’s hand has the grasp of a giant.  Agony makes a vice of a woman’s fingers.  A girl in her fright can almost bury her rose-coloured fingers in a piece of iron.  With hooked fingers they hung on somehow, as the waves dashed on and passed off them; but every wave brought them the fear of being swept away.

Suddenly they were relieved.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE PROBLEM SUDDENLY WORKS IN SILENCE.

The hurricane had just stopped short.  There was no longer in the air sou’-wester or nor’-wester.  The fierce clarions of space were mute.  The whole of the waterspout had poured from the sky without any warning of diminution, as if it had slided perpendicularly into a gulf beneath.  None knew what had become of it; flakes replaced the hailstones, the snow began to fall slowly.  No more swell:  the sea flattened down.

Such sudden cessations are peculiar to snowstorms.  The electric effluvium exhausted, all becomes still, even the wave, which in ordinary storms often remains agitated for a long time.  In snowstorms it is not so.  No prolonged anger in the deep.  Like a tired-out worker it becomes drowsy directly, thus almost giving the lie to the laws of statics, but not astonishing old seamen, who know that the sea is full of unforeseen surprises.

The same phenomenon takes place, although very rarely, in ordinary storms.  Thus, in our time, on the occasion of the memorable hurricane of July 27th, 1867, at Jersey the wind, after fourteen hours’ fury, suddenly relapsed into a dead calm.

In a few minutes the hooker was floating in sleeping waters.