was left, preserved almost by a miracle. I gazed to leeward, but only a waste of driving foam met my eye—I looked astern, nothing but the green monsters of the deep, rolling mountain high, were seen. At this instant another deluge of foam whistled past, blinding my eyes with spray, and jerking me with a giant’s power from my hold. Buried in brine, bruised, despairing, and almost stunned, I thought my hour had come, and breathing a momentary prayer to heaven for mercy, I resigned myself to death. Suddenly my hand struck against something, which, with an instinctive love for life, I grasped. My progress was instantaneously checked, and, although the resistance almost snapped my arms from their sockets, I still clung to the object I had caught. When the billow had whirled past, and the spray had ceased to blind my eyes, I saw that I had seized one of the posts of the bulwarks. Taking advantage of a momentary lull, I crept to a place of greater security, and sat down to ponder over my chances of escape. All through that awful night I clung to my frail support, expecting momently to be swept from it into eternity. Language cannot describe my feelings. No pen can paint the horrors of those long and dreary hours. The air grew intensely cold: the rain became hail. The sky, if possible, lowered more gloomily, and the billows rolled higher and higher around me, while the deep tones of the tempest mingled with the chafing of the surges, rose up over all like the wild choral symphony which we dream of as forever rising from the world of ruin and despair. Borne aloft on the waves, or hurried down into the abyss, drenched, bruised, and bewildered, I saw no gleam of hope. Beneath me was the boiling deep—above me the sky seemed settling bodily down. Now the gale whistled shrilly past, or now wailed moaningly away to leeward. Darkness and terror were all around me.