They might perish at any moment! at any moment! and all ten of them. This was the conviction of each one. They told me how endless the dark hours of that terrible night seemed; and one man said, "That the thought that seemed ever present with him, was the bitter way that his little boy sobbed and cried when he bid him good-bye, and how he would cry again when he heard that 'Dadda was gone.'" At last there was a streak of dawn, but the mast had fallen over almost to a level with the water and seemed still yielding rapidly; they might see the sunrise again, but that was all; when one of the sailors cried out, "A steamer!" "What good can that be to us?" and they watch her without interest, for there seems little chance of her coming in their direction. "Ah! she is running down the edge of the Sands, and comes nearer, and nearer!"--"Well she can't help us if she does; no boat can come across the Sands to us in this surf--No! no." Shortly, a man cries, "She has a large boat in tow;"--"What! perhaps a life-boat! it may be that some passing vessel made us out yesterday and has sent a life-boat;" Oh, what a thought of hope, of joy, of life! "Can it be so? it is--it is! thank God it is--it is! Look, she has left the steamer and is coming in through the breakers straight towards us!" It is something to remember, the way in which one man said to me, as if almost unnerved by the remembrance, "Oh, what a beauty she looked! what a beauty she looked coming over those seas!" The steamer and life-boat had got out to the Sands after battling with the storm for a distance of twenty-six miles. At about 11 o'clock the night before, they spoke the Lightship on the Kentish Knock, and learnt the bearings of the wreck; but they found that it was impossible to discover her in the darkness of the night and storm, so after several vain efforts they lay to until the morning. As soon as it was light they went in search of the wreck, and the life-boat made in across the Sands, and it was then truly a great matter of heartfelt congratulation to the life-boat men that all their labour and perseverance had not been in vain; for to their great joy they could see the crew in the rigging. They anchored the boat as near to the wreck as they could venture, and then let the cable veer out until the boat was under the vessel's jib-boom. It was low-tide--the seas were not breaking over the wreck so violently as they had been; and the men were able to work their way out on to the bowsprit, and drop into the boat, and thus the ten men were saved, after being twenty-six hours holding on in the maintop of the wreck. The flood-tide was just making; all felt, that as soon as it rose and the wreck began to heave and work again, the mast would speedily go, and they realized to the full that they had only been saved just in time.