her sides; men with axes trying to clear the wreckage. We could render no help, as we swept along, or even hail her to ask what damage she had sustained. "She was caught," said the mate, before she could ship her canvas, but our Skipper knows his work; he has laid her head so that we shall drift towards and out of the outer circle of the cyclone, or else we might have drifted into its centre, and been carried away with it anywhere."
The wind continued in full force till midnight; lightning vivid and incessant, playing all round us, and often falling like fireballs right on the vessel. Not much sleep that night, until about five in the morning, in one instant, it seemed, the wind fell. Coming on deck at daylight, somehow, the ship looked like a forest after a tornado, masts and spars like trees stripped of foliage, the decks like land just recovering from drenching floods.
"He maketh the storm to cease; so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they are at rest, and so He bringeth them unto the haven where they would be." At last the shores of the Old Country again: Plymouth, and the coast in all its Autumn beauty; a lovely, peaceful morning and a golden day, as we sailed slowly up the Channel to land at Gravesend. Word was passed round for a meeting of all the passengers. They presented me with an address written by a third-class passenger, and signed by everyone in the ship, full of kindly and grateful remembrance of the escape we all had had from the perils of wind and ice and wave. Good-byes after a voyage of eighty-five days together are unique: the time and conditions of acquaintance are almost enough for intimate friendship, yet in
