The crew was lowering the jolly-boat full of passengers when they reached the deck. Notwithstanding the peril, for the ship would not float another ten minutes it was being shouted, two of the sailors were arguing angrily about the rig of the craft that struck the _Wizard Queen_. One declared with an oath that it was a schooner; the other affirmed with equal vigor that it had been a barquantine. A ship's officer hurrying by fell to cursing them for rascals that they should stand there arguing when the starboard lifeboat must be launched. "Women and children first," the captain thundered. A fiercer squall drummed overhead, and the emigrants that still remained in the ship huddled together in fear of that dreadful brew of waters upon which they were soon to float away. Somebody urged Elizabeth toward the lifeboat; but she drew back. "Let somebody go instead of me. I'll wait for my husband," she said. But it happened that she was the last woman left and that there was still room for Edward and old James, so that presently all three climbed into the lifeboat. "Lower away!" The lifeboat rocked for a moment in the davits; and then just as she reached the sea, being full in the weather, she was driven with great force against the ship's side and stove in. She seemed to be brimming over, but nevertheless the crew managed to shove her off, although by this time she was so deep in the water that the wretched passengers sitting on the thwarts were submerged from the waist downwards. It was only the cork in her compartments that kept her barely afloat. There were many faces still looking down from the steamer, and all on board probably went down with her, or if the cutter was launched she must have been swamped immediately, for a minute or two later the _Wizard Queen_ rose forward in the air and sank stern first. Now one by one, as the icy waves broke over them, the women and men in the lifeboat dropped from exhaustion into the sea. Old James Taylor was among the first to go, falling backward without a cry, without a word of reproach, as silently as one of his own red apples might fall at home in the first October gale. "Did the Captain say where we was?" asked the man at the tiller. "Abreast of Beachy Head," one shouted in reply, and as he spoke a wave swept him and a woman and a child into the darkness. "O God! he's dead. He's lying dead in my arms!" cried a miserable father who was holding in his arms a little boy of five or six. "Drop the body overboard," the man at the tiller shouted. "Every pound tells. Lighten the boat," he roared angrily. "Lighten the boat!" The wretched father, clasping his dead child more closely, turned away in indignation at the brutal order; but as he turned a wave swept him and the body overboard, and the boat was lightened a little more.