“Lie down!” he shouted wildly through his trumpet; “down by the backstays; down for your lives; every man of you, down!”

A solitary individual profited by the warning gliding to the deck with the velocity of the wind.  But rope parted after rope, and the fatal snapping of the wood followed.  For a moment, the towering maze tottered, seeming to wave towards every quarter of the heavens; and then, yielding to the movements of the hull, the whole fell, with a heavy crash, into the sea.  Cord, lanyard, and stay snapped like thread, as each received in succession the strain of the ship, leaving the naked and despoiled hull of the Caroline to drive before the tempest, as if nothing had occurred to impede its progress.

A mute and eloquent pause succeeded the disaster.  It seemed as if the elements themselves were appeased by their work, and something like a momentary lull in the awful rushing of the winds might have been fancied.  Wilder sprang to the side of the vessel, and distinctly beheld the victims, who still clung to their frail support.  He even saw Earing waving his hand in adieu with a seaman’s heart, like a man who not only felt how desperate was his situation, but who knew how to meet it with resignation.  Then the wreck of spars, with all who clung to it, was swallowed up in the body of the frightful, preternatural-looking mist which extended on every side of them, from the ocean to the clouds.

“Stand by, to clear away a boat!” shouted Wilder, without pausing to think of the impossibility of one’s swimming, or of effecting the least good, in so violent a tornado.

But the amazed and confounded seamen who remained needed no instruction in this matter.  Not a man moved, nor was the smallest symptom of obedience given.  The mariners looked wildly around them, each endeavouring to trace in the dusky countenance of some shipmate his opinion of the extent of the evil; but not a mouth opened among them all.

“It is too late—­it is too late!” murmured Wilder; “human skill and human efforts could not save them!”

“Sail, ho!” Knighthead shouted in a voice that was teeming with superstitious awe.

“Let him come on,” returned his young commander, bitterly; “the mischief is ready done to his hands!”

“Should this be a true ship, it is our duty to the owners and the passengers to speak her, if a man can make his voice heard in this tempest,” the second mate continued, pointing, through the haze, at the dim object that was certainly at hand.

“Speak her!—­passengers!” muttered Wilder, involuntarily repeating his words.  “No; any thing is better than speaking her.  Do you see the vessel that is driving down upon us so fast?” he sternly demanded of the watchful seaman who still clung to the wheel of the Caroline.

“Ay, ay, sir.”

“Give her a berth—­sheer away hard to port—­perhaps he may pass us in the gloom, now we are no higher than our decks.  Give the ship a broad sheer, I say, sir.”