A half-mile or more away, in the very heart of the squall, a little boat with full sail set was staggering unto death. Language cannot hint at the horror in the mother's face. She had made her summer's home for fifteen years within a shell's throw of the sea, and she knew perfectly well what this situation meant. No one could have undeceived her, and no one tried. She stood for a moment staring straight ahead, stretched out her arms, swayed, and fell. She was one of the fainting kind, and there was nothing to be done about it. We carried her in and laid her down. It was my impulse to trust her to her terrified servants. I was too terrified myself to know whether I was right or wrong. Irresistibly compelled, I rushed out of doors again, and appealed (with feminine instinct, I suppose) to the only man, within reach. Scud responded quickly enough. "Yes; that's them!" He pitched his orotund voice upon me as if he were giving a command in a gale at sea. Men now began to gesticulate wildly at the ill-fated boat from the rocks, as if that could help the matter. "Drop that mains'l, you ---- fools, or you'll go to ----!" The voices struck me like a volley of bullets, but they could not have penetrated ten feet to windward. "Scud!" I cried. "Help! Save them, Scud!" "I can't do nothing," he howled in my ear. "No one can't. You can't row in them breakers." By this time the wind had increased its force. The sail-boat was near enough for one to see the desperate attempts the boyish skipper made to lower the sail. One of the halyards had become caught. The boy made wild rushes to the mast. Then the boat would rock and fly around. To save her the lad darted back to the helm just in time. This sickening struggle against a knot was repeated several times. On the bottom the three passengers lay inert with terror. A twenty-foot boat with full sail, when hundred-ton schooners trembled under bare poles! Even my inexperience grasped the situation. "He's doing all-fired well, but he can't last no longer if that--He'll be druv on the rocks! They'll be druv to----!" The rocks were now lined with men commenting in an apathetic way upon the tragedy enacting before their eyes. "Why don't they _do_ something?" In my ignorance of the curious stolidity which falls upon the shore in face of danger upon the sea, I stood shrieking: "Why doesn't somebody go? Why don't you men do _something_?" The fishermen and the summer people looked into each other's eyes, but no man answered a word. "Can't _you_ help them?" I pleaded with another weather-beaten fisherman. "Can't be done, or I'd do it." "I came down to see them capsize, an' I guess they'll go," said a gruff voice. But Scud gave me a long look. He stood quite silent. An expression of rare gravity was on his joyous face. He glanced apprehensively from the boat to the house.