should have been waving good-bye to his lady love from the poop, sat down abruptly,—­the crew likewise; not, however, before she had heeled to the scuppers, and a half-bucket of iced water had run it.  Head-hunters were mere daily episodes in Grits’s existence, but water...  He muttered something in cockney that sounded like a prayer....  The wind was rapidly driving us toward the middle of the pond, and something cold and ticklish was seeping through the seats of our trousers.  We sat like statues....

The bright scene etched itself in my memory—­the bare brown slopes with which the pond was bordered, the Irish shanties, the clothes-lines with red flannel shirts snapping in the biting wind; Nancy motionless on the bank; the group behind her, silent now, impressed in spite of itself at the sight of our intrepidity.

The Petrel was sailing stern first....  Would any of us, indeed, ever see home again?  I thought of my father’s wrath turned to sorrow because he had refused to gratify a son’s natural wish and present him with a real rowboat....  Out of the corners of our eyes we watched the water creeping around the gunwale, and the very muddiness of it seemed to enhance its coldness, to make the horrors of its depths more mysterious and hideous.  The voice of Grits startled us.

“O Gawd,” he was saying, “we’re a-going to sink, and I carn’t swim!  The blarsted tar’s give way back here.”

“Is she leaking?” I cried.

“She’s a-filling up like a bath tub,” he lamented.

Slowly but perceptibly, in truth, the bow was rising, and above the whistling of the wind I could hear his chattering as she settled....  Then several things happened simultaneously:  an agonized cry behind me, distant shouts from the shore, a sudden upward lunge of the bow, and the torture of being submerged, inch by inch, in the icy, yellow water.  Despite the splashing behind me, I sat as though paralyzed until I was waist deep and the boards turned under me, and then, with a spasmodic contraction of my whole being I struck out—­only to find my feet on the muddy bottom.  Such was the inglorious end of the good ship Petrel!  For she went down, with all hands, in little more than half a fathom of water....  It was not until then I realized that we had been blown clear across the pond!

Figures were running along the shore.  And as Tom and I emerged dragging Grits between us,—­for he might have been drowned there abjectly in the shallows,—­we were met by a stout and bare-armed Irishwoman whose scanty hair, I remember, was drawn into a tight knot behind her head; and who seized us, all three, as though we were a bunch of carrots.

“Come along wid ye!” she cried.