‘As stone, sir,’ he answered. ‘The shells come away pretty easy, but her timber’s growed into regular iron.’ I asked him how many holes they were going to pierce. He answered three, that she might be draining handsomely through the night. ‘The sooner we can rig up a sail, Finn, to serve as a shelter, the better,’ I called down to him. ‘When the sun is gone there’ll be nothing to see by. The men will be wanting their supper too; then there’s that lump of a porpoise to be got out of the craft, for we don’t want to be poisoned as well as shipwrecked; and if daylight enough lives after all this,’ I continued, ‘we ought to beach high and dry as much as we can come at to-night that may be washing about out of the yacht down there, in case it should come on to blow. There’s no moving on this island for the holes in it when the darkness falls.’ ‘Ay, ay, sir, we’ll be with ye in a jiffy,’ he answered. ‘What think you of this marine show?’ I said to Laura. ‘It is too beautiful to believe real. The mermaids have made a garden of this ship. How lovingly, with what exquisite taste have they decorated these old decks!’ ‘Happy for us,’ I exclaimed, ‘that the earthquake should have struck her fair, and brought her, beflowered and bejewelled as she is, to the surface. She is more than an asylum. She compels our attention and comes between us and our thoughts and fears.’ ‘Would she float, do you think, if all the water were to be let out of her?’ ‘I would not stake a kiss from you, Laura, on it, but unless she is full of petrified cargo and ocean deposit, stones, shells, and so on, I don’t see why she shouldn’t swim, though she might float deep.’ ‘Imagine if we could launch her and save our lives by her!’ cried Laura, clasping her hands; then changing her voice and casting down her eyes she added: ‘I must go to Henrietta. She watches me intently. She wonders that I can smile, I dare say; and I wonder too when I think for an instant. Poor Wilfrid! poor Wilfrid! and my maid too, and the others who are lying dead in that calm sea.’ She moved away slowly towards her sister.