“The officers ought all to have been sitting here on the promenade deck,” suggested one ironical spirit in the crowd, but no one noticed him.

The gentleman in the silk travelling-cap now took a chair, and a number of sympathetic listeners drew their chairs about him, and then began an interchange of experience, in which each related to the last particular all that he felt, thought, and said, and, if married, what his wife felt, thought, and said, at the moment of the calamity.  They turned the disaster over and over in their talk, and rolled it under their tongues.  Then they reverted to former accidents in which they had been concerned; and the silk-capped gentleman told, to the common admiration, of a fearful escape of his, on the Erie Road, from being thrown down a steep embankment fifty feet high by a piece of rock that had fallen on the track.  “Now just see, gentlemen, what a little thing, humanly speaking, life depends upon.  If that old woman had been able to sleep, and hadn’t sent that boy down to warn the train, we should have run into the rock and been dashed to pieces.  The passengers made up a purse for the boy, and I wrote a full account of it to the papers.”

“Well,” said one of the group, a man in a hard hat, “I never lie down on a steamboat or a railroad train.  I want to be ready for whatever happens.”

The others looked at this speaker with interest, as one who had invented a safe method of travel.

“I happened to be up to-night, but I almost always undress and go to bed, just as if I were in my own house,” said the gentleman of the silk cap.

“I don’t say your way isn’t the best, but that’s my way.”

The champions of the rival systems debated their merits with suavity and mutual respect, but they met with scornful silence a compromising spirit who held that it was better to throw off your coat and boots, but keep your pantaloons on.  Meanwhile, the steamer was hanging idle upon the current, against which it now and then stirred a careless wheel, still waiting for the return of the small boats.  Thin gray clouds, through rifts of which a star sparkled keenly here and there, veiled the heavens; shadowy bluffs loomed up on either hand; in a hollow on the left twinkled a drowsy little town; a beautiful stillness lay on all.

After an hour’s interval a shout was heard from far down the river; then later the plash of oars; then a cry hailing the approaching boats, and the answer, “All safe!” Presently the boats had come alongside, and the passengers crowded down to the guard to learn the details of the search.  Basil heard a hollow, moaning, gurgling sound, regular as that of the machinery, for some note of which he mistook it.  “Clear the gangway there!” shouted a gruff voice; “man scalded here!” And a burden was carried by from which fluttered, with its terrible regularity, that utterance of mortal anguish.

Basil went again to the forward promenade, and sat down to see the morning come.