Now the engines were stopped altogether, and we drifted with the current. Not that I could see the boat drift, for I could not, the stars being all gone by this time. This drifting was the dismalest work; it held one's heart still. Presently I discovered a blacker gloom than that which surrounded us. It was the head of the island. We were closing right down upon it. We entered its deeper shadow, and so imminent seemed the peril that I was likely to suffocate; and I had the strongest impulse to do _something_, anything, to save the vessel. But still Mr. Bixby stood by his wheel, silent, intent as a cat, and all the pilots stood shoulder to shoulder at his back. "She'll not make it!" somebody whispered. The water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman's cries, till it was down to-- "Eight-and-a-half!... E-i-g-h-t feet!... E-i-g-h-t feet!... Seven-and--" Mr. Bixby said warningly through his speaking-tube to the engineer:-- "Stand by, now!" "Ay-ay, sir!" "Seven-and-a-half! Seven feet! _Six_-and--" We touched bottom! Instantly Mr. Bixby set a lot of bells ringing, shouted through the tube, "_Now_ let her have it--every ounce you've got!" then to his partner, "Put her hard down! snatch her! snatch her!" The boat rasped and ground her way through the sand, hung upon the apex of disaster a single tremendous instant, and then over she went! And such a shout as went up at Mr. Bixby's back never loosened the roof of a pilot-house before! There was no more trouble after that. Mr. Bixby was a hero that night; and it was some little time, too, before his exploit ceased to be talked about by river men. AN EXPEDITION AGAINST OGRES From 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court': copyright 1889, by Charles L. Webster and Company My expedition was all the talk that day and that night, and the boys were very good to me, and made much of me, and seemed to have forgotten their vexation and disappointment, and come to be as anxious for me to hive those ogres and set those ripe old virgins loose as if it were themselves that had the contract. Well, they _were_ good children--but just children, that is all. And they gave me no end of points about how to scout for giants, and how to scoop them in; and they told me all sorts of charms against enchantments, and gave me salves and other rubbish to put on my wounds. But it never occurred to one of them to reflect that if I was such a wonderful necromancer as I was pretending to be, I ought not to need salves, or instructions, or charms against enchantments, and least of all arms and armor, on a foray of any kind--even against fire-spouting dragons and devils hot from perdition, let alone such poor adversaries as these I was after, these commonplace ogres of the back settlements.