He had scarcely uttered these words when a shock ran through the ship for all the world as though the heave of the swell had let her fall with violence upon some hard shoal. The decks trembled as though to an explosion. The tremor of the fabric seemed to enter into one’s very marrow, and it would be impossible to express the sense of dismay it excited, happening as it did on a black night, and in the middle of the wide ocean where we knew there could be no shoals for hundreds of leagues.

The light at the yard-arm vanished; there was a noise of hurrying feet forwards, with a rumbling of exclamations uttered in agitation.

“What was that?” was shouted from the companion-hatch in the captain’s familiar accents. “Mr. Johnson?”

“Sir?”

“What have we struck? Is there any ship near us?”

“I don’t know, sir,” answered the mate; “it has been as black as thunder all through.”

“Get a cast of the lead,” exclaimed the captain, but quietly, with no note of hurry in his voice; “send the carpenter aft to sound the pumps; get lanterns up to show a light over the side.”

The blow felt as though the ship had struck some floating wreck. In a minute the vessel was wide awake. The shock had aroused the sleepers, who came tumbling up pell-mell out of cabin and forecastle. The decks, which before were of a death-like stillness, were now alive with sailors running about, with passengers full of excitement and fear, with lanterns briskly travelling from place to place, with one stationary one at the pumps, where the white-haired carpenter stood lowering his sounding-rod, with the deliberation of a Scotchman, down the well.

There was nothing to be seen over the side, and there was no more water in the bottom of the ship than was always to be found there. The sea was sounded all around with the hand-lead, but, as will readily be supposed, no bottom was got.

In the midst of this commotion the heavens seemed to be split open by a flash of lightning; the whole surface of the ocean shone out to its farthest confines to the crimson blaze, and then came, within three seconds of the terrific glare, a crash of thunder right overhead. The enormous explosion liberated the rain; down it came, a very Niagara Falls of water! In a trice it was up to a man’s knees in the main-deck, and every mother’s son of us was as a drowned rat, soaked through and through; the passengers rushing headlong to the hatches, and the sailors floundering about here and there to the hurried cries of the mate ordering sail to be shortened.

There was no more lightning, but the rain continued to fall in a living sheet of water, which flashed the fire up out of the sea all about us. Indeed, the black atmosphere was extraordinarily full of electricity, and even through the blinding veil of the rain you could catch a sight of bluish sparks glittering about the ironwork, with the coming and going of nebulous lights upon the yard-arms and bowsprit. The ship was snugged down, but the furling of the wet and beating canvas was hard work. You could not see an inch before your face. I had to grope my way on to the mizzen topsail yard as a man might through a small tunnel in the bottom of a pyramid. The foot-ropes were as slippery as ice, and as my legs were very short my situation was one of real danger, not more due to the sickening rolling and strong beating of the heavy saturated canvas than to the circumstance of Poole being alongside of me—by which I mean that his long legs, like a pair of compasses, weighed down the foot-rope upon which we were standing into an angle down which I would slide, until my feet were off the line, and there was nothing to save me from going overboard but my grip of the jack-stay.

All the while that we were working we expected the mass of impenetrable shadow that hung over our heads, dark as the midnight inkiness of a vault, to burst into a roaring gale of wind; yet all remained quiet; the rain ceased; saving the straining noises of the rolling ship there was nothing to be heard but the sobbing of water cascading off the decks overboard through the scupper holes. No more shocks were felt, though I fancy the nerves of us all continued on the strain in expectation of such another thump as that which had sent the people below running up in terror through the hatches.

At midnight it was still a thick black calm, and the same high swell working that had been running throughout the watch. I was not a little rejoiced to hear the chimes of the bell, for I had been soaked by the downfall to the very marrow, yet durst not leave the deck for a minute to change my wet clothes for dry ones. We turned in dog-tired, and slept without a stir throughout the four hours; and when we were called again at four o’clock the stars were shining, the moon was setting in the west, a fresh breeze was blowing over our starboard quarter, and the Lady Violet was once more driving through it on her way home under canvas that clothed her from truck to waterway.

What it was that we had struck or that had struck us could only be a matter of conjecture. The captain was of opinion that the shock had been caused by a submarine earthquake—a volcanic explosion deep down. “It was the right sort of night,” he argued, “for disturbances of that kind; the water full of fire, and the atmosphere tingling with electricity.” On the other hand, Mr. Johnson had no doubt that the ship had received a blow from the rising of a whale under her keel. The creature had risen to spout, but had been frightened by the thump it had given itself and made off.

It was a thing, as I had said, that one could only speculate upon. The ship was divided into two parties, one accepting the captain’s and the other the mate’s opinion. Which side I declared for I do not remember; but on recurring to the incident at this distance of time, I have no doubt whatever that the mate was in the right, for since those days I have been on board a ship where an earthquake has happened in the deep sea beneath her, and the sort of vibratory scraping sensation that accompanied the shock was entirely different from the dull lumpish thud that had made every heart in the Lady Violet beat fast on that black night.

As we approached the entrance to the English Channel ships grew numerous, and every hour yielded us a fresh canvas of ocean panorama. At daybreak one morning we spied a large ship right ahead, and by four o’clock in the afternoon had approached her close enough to read the name upon her stern; and great was our triumph when we discovered that she was the fine clipper ship Owen Glendower, that had left Sydney eight days before us. We passed her in the night, and the watch on deck let fly an ironical cheer at her, taking their chance of being heard, and at sunrise next morning nothing but her royal and topgallant sails were visible on the shining line of the horizon.

It was rather thick weather in the Channel, and we saw no land till we made the South Foreland. A fine cutter came thrashing through it to alongside of us when off Dungeness, and a pilot climbed out of her over our side. With what profound interest, and joy, and admiration did my young eyes explore his purple visage, and survey his stout coat and the warm shawl round his neck! He had not been on board ten minutes when the sun shone forth, and the green and frothing waters of the Channel showed clear to the horizon. Then it was that the coast of our dear old home lay fair and beautiful upon our port beam and bow—white cliffs slopes of green sward, delicate as satin, groups of Liliputian houses, with windows sparkling, the chocolate-coloured canvas of smacks, the white wings of pleasure-yachts, the grimy cloths of round-bowed, black-hulled colliers, enriching the surface of the laughing seas betwixt us and the line of shingle upon which the surf was surging.

Off the South Foreland a tug chased and cleverly hooked us by making a short cut to the North Foreland, where she intercepted us as we swept round in a large, majestic arch, with the red-hulled lightship stationed abreast of Ramsgate resting like a spot of colour against the yellow shelf of the Goodwin Sands, on our port quarter, and a busy scene of shipping opening under our bows as we headed for the River Thames. But the shift of helm brought the wind ahead, and by this time our captain and the skipper of the tug, having agreed upon the question of terms for towage, the order was given to clew up and furl; a line from the tug was hove to us, the end of a huge hawser attached to it and paid out over the bow, and presently the Lady Violet, in tow of the panting little steamer, was quietly gliding along for her home in the East India Docks, with her crew aloft sending down sails and unreeving gear.

News of our being in the Channel had reached my father long before we had arrived in the river, and he was one of the first to step on board when we had been warped to our berth in the docks.

I was below, polishing myself up to go ashore, when Kennet called through the hatch that my father was on the quarter-deck and waiting to see me. I rushed up, and in a moment was in his arms. I had no objection to his kissing me now; in fact, I may say that I kissed him. The overstrained sense of manliness in me was gone. I was a young sailor with a full heart, and there were tears both in my father’s and my own eyes as he drew away from me, after our first hug, to have a good look at me.

“The picture of health!—gracious, how sunburnt—grown a whole foot, I do declare!—my goodness, Tommy, what shoulders!”

This, and the like, was all he could say for some time. I asked after my mother, my sisters, my little brother. Thank God, they were all well, and eagerly awaiting my arrival at home.

“I have ordered a jolly good dinner at the Brunswick Hotel,” said my father; “let us go and partake of it, my son. But first you will say good-bye to the officers and your shipmates.”

The captain was not to be seen. Mr. Johnson shook me cordially by the hand and assured my father that I had the making of a sailor in me. All the midshipmen had hurried ashore with the exception of Kennet, who was below, sitting on a chest smoking his pipe when I descended to say farewell to such of the lads as I could find in the cabin. He pretended to weep as he squeezed my hand.

I said, “Kennet, are you not going ashore?”

“Yeth,” he said; “but I muth finith my pipe firtht.”

“Kennet,” I said, “come and dine with my father and me. He has ordered a good dinner to be in readiness for us at the Brunswick Hotel.”

He threw down the sooty clay pipe he had been smoking and jumped up.

“Rockafellar,” he said, “I alwayth thaid you were a brick!”

A little later, my father, Kennet, and myself were seated at a table, white with damask and sparkling with glass, in a window overlooking the Docks. Oh! the excellence of the roast beef! Oh! the sweetness of the cauliflower with its melted butter! Oh! the incomparable flavour of the mealy potatoes!

“Ithth the change from thalt horthe, thir, that maketh it nithe,” said Kennet, with his mouth full.

And so ended Master Rockafellar’s voyage. Would you like to know if I ever went to sea again? Well it is a question that need not signify just now. If this little yarn which I have been spinning has amused you, then, should you desire more by-and-by, I don’t doubt there is enough stuff stowed away in the locker of my memory to make plenty of “twisters,” as stories are called at sea. Meanwhile, boys and girls, I touch the peak of my midshipman’s cap to you in respectful farewell.

UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, WOKING AND LONDON.