Even in that nobly simple story of disaster at sea, told of St. Paul, the approach of the catastrophe is unattended by noise; there is none of the confusion and shrieking of cordage that mark the stagey shipwreck of modern fiction. Nor did those old shipmen yield the loss of their ship without a good fight; but after sounding twice they cast four anchors out of the stern and quietly watched for the day. After which, the ship's head being already shoreward, the rudderbands were loosed, and a final effort was made to save their vessel by running for a creek; until falling into a place where two seas met, the ship struck, and some on planks, and some on broken pieces of the wreck, all got safe to shore. [Illustration: _The Old Seaclock_] Chiswick Press PRINTED BY CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON, E.C. Transcriber's Notes: Punctuation normalized. Anachronistic, non-standard, and inconsistent spellings retained as printed. Italics markup is enclosed in _underscores_. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Life Aboard a British Privateer in the Time of Queen Anne, by Robert C. Leslie