It was a loud cry, indeed, and there was good reason for it. Well for all on board the great French steamship that she was running no faster at the time, and that there was no hurricane of a gale to make things worse for her. Pilot and captain had both together missed their reckoning,--neither of them could ever afterward tell how,--and there they were stuck fast in the sand, with the noise of breakers ahead of them and the dense fog all around. Frank Harley peered anxiously over the rail again, but he could not have complained that he was "wrecked in sight of shore;" for the steamer was anything but a wreck yet, and there was no such thing as a shore in sight. "It's an hour to sunrise," said Dab to Ford, after the latter had managed to comprehend the situation. "We may as well run further in and see what we can see." It must have been aggravating to the people on the steamer to see that cockle-shell of a yacht dancing safely along over the shoal on which their "leviathan" had struck, and to hear Ford Foster sing out: "If we'd known you meant to run in here, we'd have followed some other pilot." "They're in no danger at all," said Dab. "If their own boats don't take 'em all ashore, the coast-wreckers will." "The Government life-savers, I s'pose you mean?" "Yes, they're all along here, everywhere. Hark! there goes the distress gun. Bang away! It sounds a good deal more mad than scared." So it did, and so they really were--captain, pilot, passengers and all. "Captain Kinzer" found that he could safely run in for a couple of hundred yards or so; but there were signs of surf beyond, and he had no anchor to hold on by. His only course was to tack back and forth, as carefully as possible, and wait for daylight, as the French sailors were doing, with what patience they could command. In less than half an hour, however, a pair of long, graceful, buoyant-looking life-boats, manned each by an officer and eight rowers, came shooting through the mist, in response to the repeated summons of the steamer's cannon. "It's all right now," said Dab. "I knew they wouldn't be long in coming. Let's find where we are." That was easy enough. The steamer had gone ashore on a sand-bar a quarter of a mile from the beach and a short distance from Seabright, on the Jersey coast; and there was no probability of any worse harm coming to her than the delay in her voyage, and the cost of pulling her out from the sandy bed into which she had so blindly thrust herself. The passengers would, most likely, be taken ashore with their baggage, and sent to the city overland. "In fact," said Ford Foster, "a sand-bar isn't as bad for a steamer as a pig is for a locomotive." "The train you was wrecked in," said Dab, "was running fast. Perhaps the pig was. Now, the sand-bar was standing still, and the steamer was going slow. My! what a crash there'd have been, if she'd been running ten or twelve knots an hour with a heavy sea on."