was close down upon the reef; doomed herself, it might yet be possible to save a portion of her crew; and for this end Captain Fritze placed his reliance on the very hugeness of the seas that threatened him.  The moment was watched for with the anxiety of despair, but the coolness of disciplined courage.  As she rose on the fatal wave, her moorings were simultaneously slipped; she broached to in rising; and the sea heaved her bodily upward and cast her down with a concussion on the summit of the reef, where she lay on her beam-ends, her back broken, buried in breaching seas, but safe.  Conceive a table:  the Eber in the darkness had been smashed against the rim and flung below; the Adler, cast free in the nick of opportunity, had been thrown upon the top.  Many were injured in the concussion; many tossed into the water; twenty perished.  The survivors crept again on board their ship, as it now lay, and as it still remains, keel to the waves, a monument of the sea’s potency.  In still weather, under a cloudless sky, in those seasons when that ill-named ocean, the Pacific, suffers its vexed shores to rest, she lies high and dry, the spray scarce touching her—­the hugest structure of man’s hands within a circuit of a thousand miles—­tossed up there like a schoolboy’s cap upon a shelf; broken like an egg; a thing to dream of.

The unfriendly consuls of Germany and Britain were both that morning in Matautu, and both displayed their nobler qualities.  De Coetlogon, the grim old soldier, collected his family and kneeled with them in an agony of prayer for those exposed.  Knappe, more fortunate in that he was called to a more active service, must, upon the striking of the Adler, pass to his own consulate.  From this he was divided by the Vaisingano, now a raging torrent, impetuously charioting the trunks of trees.  A kelpie might have dreaded to attempt the passage; we may conceive this brave but unfortunate and now ruined man to have found a natural joy in the exposure of his life; and twice that day, coming and going, he braved the fury of the river.  It was possible, in spite of the darkness of the hurricane and the continual breaching of the seas, to remark human movements on the Adler; and by the help of Samoans, always nobly forward in the work, whether for friend or enemy, Knappe sought long to get a line conveyed from shore, and was for long defeated.  The shore guard of fifty men stood to their arms the while upon the beach, useless themselves, and a great deterrent of Samoan usefulness.  It was perhaps impossible that this mistake should be avoided.  What more natural, to the mind of a European, than that the Mataafas should fall upon the Germans in this hour of their disadvantage?  But they had no other thought than to assist; and those who now rallied beside Knappe braved (as they supposed) in doing so a double danger, from the fury of the sea and the weapons of their enemies.  About nine, a quarter-master swam ashore, and reported