The boat had been shoved off, and had returned for some article, left accidentally behind. A group of weather-wise old sailors thronged about the foolhardy crew, in vain urging them to wait for fairer weather. They put out to sea again, and made straight for the cape under the summer palace of Tiberius. This is a well-known point, which boatmen often seek when they desire to catch a direct wind for their passage to the main-land. The gale that had been blowing round the island appeared to pour out from this point its undivided force, and beat the sea with a strength almost irresistible. We saw the mast of the little boat snapped the moment it had reached the cape, and the crew put back, not to await calmer weather, but to seek another temporary mast, and start again. No threat or persuasion could detain the Italians, who feared to exceed their term of leave. A rude mast was set up, and again the boat started, leaping across wave after wave. We saw no more of it. “I watched it for some distance,” said the captain of the barque, which had started at the same time. “Their mast bent as though it would break with every puff of wind, and the little sail fluttered like a handkerchief upon the waves. In a moment it disappeared, and we knew that our foreboding had proved true.” The rest of the tale I had from the lips of the black-bearded official, the sole survivor; and a wilder tale of human passion does not often fall within the bounds of sober truth. The old mariner, at starting, had been placed at the helm as the most competent man of the party; but there was an alarming difference between the eddies, currents, and billows at the cape, and the smooth waters of the Bay of Naples. A monstrous _cavallone_ appeared in the distance; leaping, roaring, foaming, it was close upon their quarter; its crest overhung them; in an instant, said my informant, they were swallowed up. The boat was overturned; but the crew—struggling desperately for life—rose with it once more to the surface, clinging to its bottom. In their last agony they glared upon each other, face to face, among the beating waves, and the loud execrations of his companions were poured passionately on the ancient mariner, whose want of skill was cursed as the fatal cause of their despair. The hold of the poor old fellow, weak with age and faint with emotion, had not strength to bear him up amid the tossing of the waters, and as his grasp relaxed, the others watched his weakness with a fiendish satisfaction. “It is some consolation,” exclaimed one, “to see you die first, fool as you are!” He did not hear the latest maledictions, but went down in the deep sea. The next who died was Raffaelluccio, upon whose daily work the daily bread of a mother and three sisters depended. “I am stiff with cold, and can hang on no longer,” he said to his companion. “Get on my shoulders,” was the answer of the stronger man. And so he did, and so he died: the living