I won’t say anything here against Ike Summers,—all of us have our failings,—but what I do say is this: his being drunk while she was loading caused one of the worst accidents on record, and the loss of one of the finest ships I ever saw. Half of the crew were drunk of course, and twenty-six hundred tons of coal were pitched in at random. I’ll swear she wasn’t half trimmed, though I was just able to get about the morning we sailed. Captain Fairley, his wife and Miss Marion got back from Tacoma the afternoon before, and I told him that night it was my opinion that the second mate had been drinking a good deal. He looked serious, but Ike swore everything was all right,—he’d got pretty well sobered up that afternoon,—and as the clearance papers had been taken out, the captain concluded to sail next day. He wanted to get to San Francisco as quickly as possible, for we’d been chartered to load from there to New York. If it hadn’t been for that, I’ve always thought the captain would have looked into the way the cargo had been stowed. He must have suspected something was wrong, for he wanted Mrs. Fairley and Miss Marion to go back by rail, but they wouldn’t hear of it. So we were towed to sea one fine April morning, having for company a crazy old bark named the _Lizzie Williams_. The _St. Lawrence_ was rated A-1 at Lloyd’s, and that bark probably had no rating at all, but the old hulk was a good deal more fit to go to sea that morning than we were, as it soon turned out. Her cargo was stowed right, even if she did have to be pumped out three times a day. Ike Summers had the afternoon watch, and when I turned in after dinner the tug had just cast us off, and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. I heard Captain Fairley tell his wife that we must be going to have a blow on account of the falling glass, but he thought it wouldn’t amount to much. Miss Marion was doing some fancy work, I remember, and Ike had just ordered some of his men to spread an old cro’-jack out on deck to be mended. It was a warm, pleasant day, and the sun shone on the sails of the _Lizzie Williams_ as she slumped along like an old canal boat a few miles to leeward. She was the last thing I saw before I went to my room and turned in. I soon dropped off, being dead tired and not very strong yet after my sickness. How long my sleep lasted don’t matter,—it seemed about ten minutes, but must have been several hours,—when I was roused by the steward shaking me and yelling “Come on deck, Mr. Morgan, for God’s sake!” That brought me to my senses in an instant, and only stopping to throw on my shoes, I ran out.