Poor Tom "lay out" on the yard with a will, above the black and seething deep, with all his strength; but in the fury of the wind it began to fail him, or it might be that in the force of the gale he lost his presence of mind, and when the men began their descent he remained, with his hands convulsively clutching the yard, and his feet on the slippery foot-ropes or in the stirrups thereof. "Now then, stupid! are you going to sleep there?" cried Paul Bitts from the crosstrees, "or must I rouse you with my colt, and make you dance the binnacle hornpipe when I get you on deck?" "Mother--oh, Mother!" the boy was heard to shriek, his small voice sounding weirdly on the skirt of the howling blast, as he slipped from the yard-arm, and vanishing into the wrack and obscurity below, was seen no more! Derval felt his blood grow cold; and as one in a dreadful dream, from which he must waken to find Tom Tit by his side, he made his way, he knew not how, but mechanically, to the deck, where the tragedy was reported to the Captain. But there was not a moment now, either for comment, explanation, or regret, for there came aft a terrible cry from the look-out man at the bowsprit. "Breakers ahead! breakers on _both_ bows!" "In the name of heaven, how came breakers here!" exclaimed Captain Talbot, for a moment forgetting that for many hours past he had been unable to verify his whereabouts. Proceeding forward in haste, the Captain went out to the cap of the bowsprit. In peril he was a man whose nerves became as iron! Steadily he looked around him, but even his cheek blanched then, though none could perceive it. Through the black gloom, a blacker barrier of mighty rocks was rising right ahead. Boiling fiercely before a northern blast, the sea was breaking on them wildly, dashing its white spray as high as the maintop, and, as the waves receded, the sable fronts of two particular or insulated masses were plainly visible from time to time, with a mass of froth between them; while accelerated by the wind astern, and no doubt by the indraught in the reef, for a reef it appeared to be, the stately _Amethyst_ seemed to increase her speed from ten knots an hour to something far beyond it. Clinging to a belaying pin on the port side, as the ship rushed on, there came into Derval's uninitiated mind only the fear of immediate death, with a quickened circulation of the blood and a painful tightness of the chest, and in this emotion men far his seniors shared, at that dreadful crisis; but now the voice of Captain Talbot, who had obtained his trumpet, was heard even amid the roar of the breakers, and a clear and manly voice it was. In that tropical region the water and spray that swept over the ship were warm nearly as new milk, and by this time the poultry and pigs were all washed overboard and drowned.