they had held, the Speed put her nose in the water and sprinkled us with
spray, plunged, and dashed off like an arrow.It was like him,——daring and insolent coolness! Just like him! Always the soul of defiance! None but one so reckless and impetuous as he would have dreamed of flying into the teeth of the tempest in that shell of a schooner. But he was mad with love, and they——there wasn’t a man among them but was the worse for liquor.

For a moment Dan took it, as Mr. Gabriel had expected him to do, as a joke, and went to trim the boat for racing, not meaning they should reach town first. But I——I saw it all.

“Dan!” I sung out, “save her! She’s not coming back! They’ll make for the schooner at Black Rocks! O Dan, he’s taken her off!”

Now one whose intelligence has never been trained, who shells his five wits and gets rid of the pods as best he can, mayn’t be so quick as another, but like an animal, he feels long before he sees; and a vague sense of this had been upon Dan all day. Yet now he stood thunderstruck; and the thing went on before his very eyes. It was more than he could believe at once,——and perhaps his first feeling was, Why should he hinder? And then the flood fell. No thought of his loss,——though loss it wa’n’t,——only of his friend,——of such stunning treachery, that, if the sun fell hissing into the sea at noon, it would have mattered less,——only of that loss that tore his heart out with it.

“Gabriel!” he shouted,——“Gabriel!” And his voice was heart-rending. I know that Mr. Gabriel felt it, for he never turned nor stirred.

Then I don’t know what came over Dan: a blind rage swelling in his heart seemed to make him larger in every limb; he towered like a flame. He sprang to the tiller, but, as he did so, saw with one flash of his eye that Mr. Gabriel had unshipped the rudder and thrown it away. He seized an oar to steer with in its place; he saw that they, in their ignorance fast edging on the flats, would shortly be aground; more fisherman than sailor, he knew a thousand tricks of boat-craft that they had never heard of. We flew, we flew through cloven ridges, we became a wind ourselves, and while I tell it he was beside them, had gathered himself as if to leap the chasm between time and eternity, and had landed among them in the Speed. The wherry careened with the shock and the water poured into her, and she flung headlong and away as his foot spurned her. Heaven knows why she didn’t upset, for I thought of nothing but the scene before me as I drifted off from it. I shut the eyes in my soul now, that I mayn’t see 

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