“What’s she doing?”—­“The LORD knows!”—­“Something’s gone wrong.”—­“Why doesn’t she go nearer?”—­“’Cos she’d be stove in, ye fool!”—­“Gude save us! they’re both gone.”—­“Not they, they’re to the left; but what the winds and waves they’re after ——­“—­“They’re trying to make him hear, likely enough, and they might as well call on my grandmother.  He’s as dead as a herring.”—­“Whisht! whisht!  He’s a living soul!  Hech, sirs! there’s nought but the grip o’ despair would haud a man on the keel of ’s boat in waves like yon.”—­“Silence, all!”

We turned our heads, for a voice rang from the look-out—­

“Man overboard from the whaleboat!”

The men were so excited, and crowded so together, that I could hardly find a peeping-place.

“He’s got him.”—­“Nay, they’re both gone.”—­“Man!  I’m just thinking that it’s ill interfering with the designs of Providence.  We may lose Peter and not save Paul.”—­“Stow your discourses, Sandy!”—­“They’re hauling in our man, and time they did.”

The captain’s voice now called to the first mate—­

“Do you make it one or both, Mr. Waters?”

“Both, sir!”

“Thank GOD!”

We hurrahed again, and the whaleboat-men replied—­but their cheer only came faintly to us, like a wail upon the wind.

Several men of our group were now called to work, and I was ordered below to bring up a hammock, and swing it in the steerage.  I was vexed, as I would have given anything to have helped to welcome the whaleboat back.

When the odd jobs I had been called to were done with, and I returned to the deck, it was just too late to see her hauled up.  I could not see over the thick standing group of men, and I did not, of course, dare to push through them to catch sight of our heroes and the man they had saved.  But a little apart from the rest, two Irish sailors were standing and bandying the harshest of brogues with such vehemence that I drew near, hoping at least to hear something of what I could not see.  It was a spirited, and one would have guessed an angry dialogue, so like did it sound to the yapping and snapping of two peppery-tempered terriers.  But it was only vehement, and this was the sum of it.

“Bedad! but it’s quare ye must have felt at the time.”

“I did not, unless it would be when Tom stepped out into the water, GOD bless him! with the rope aisy round his waist, and the waves drowning him intirely, and the corpse holding on to the boat’s bottom for the dear life.”

“Pat!” said the other in mysterious tones, “would that that’s hanging round his neck be the presarving of him, what?”

“And why wouldn’t it?  But isn’t he the big fool to be having it dangling where the wash of a wave, or a pickpocket, or a worse timptation than either might be staling it away from him?”

“And where else would he put it?”

“Did ye ever git the sight of mine?”