"'A sea picked us up and threw us at the sea-wall, the seventeen foot high sea-wall. Just before we struck, I saw the Captain move and look up. The schooner was thrown out of the water, as a porpoise jumps, vaulted the sea-wall and came to solid ground with a crash that broke every timber. We landed stern first, and the wave that followed us tore off our bow and foredeck and threw them clear over the vessel. The foredeck was found, after the storm, a hundred yards southeast of the maindeck. The bow was found eight blocks away, in the centre of the business district of the city. "'We stopped pumpin'. There weren't any pumps any more. Of the seven of us, five were unconscious when a rescuin' party reached us, through the hurricane, four hours later. Two of us were crippled for life, and it was many a long day before Bill was free from the madness which had begun with the crack on the head when the wheel was swept away. "'Daylight of Tuesday found me in bed, with an army surgeon straightenin' out my broken bones. The hurricane still raged over Galveston. We had been derelict for two days and a half, at the pumps for fifty-seven hours, without food or water for forty hours, yet not a man was lost. No other dismasted vessel has ever lived through the eye of a hurricane and been tossed over a sea-wall into the business streets of a city. Yet seven of us, all Americans, still live to tell the tale.'" The young observer paused and looked at the boys. They were all very still. "And the beach," the young observer continued, "that once white beach with its stretches of sand, what did that look like, beyond the engineers' parade ground, where the wrecked schooner lay? Mis-shapen, distorted, blotched, drabbled and crimsoned, it spread away to the horizons, east and west, its scars showing under the rays of the sun which shone out from the mares' tails of the departing hurricane. Part of it had disappeared under the waters, now rapidly subsiding. The great causeway was a mass of ruins, but the sea-wall, the two-million dollar sea-wall, stood with its front to the ocean, grimly defiant still, the conqueror against the rage of the tempest, and an unwrecked Galveston shone triumphant.