They
lost no time. As soon as she was near enough, I swung myself into her,
and called to the men, "With a will, lads! She's reeling!" We were not
an inch too far out of the inner vortex of her going down, when, by the
blue-light which John Mullion still burnt in the bow of the Surf-boat, we
saw her lurch, and plunge to the bottom head-foremost. The child cried,
weeping wildly, "O the dear Golden Mary! O look at her! Save her! Save
the poor Golden Mary!" And then the light burnt out, and the black dome
seemed to come down upon us.
I suppose if we had all stood a-top of a mountain, and seen the whole
remainder of the world sink away from under us, we could hardly have felt
more shocked and solitary than we did when we knew we were alone on the
wide ocean, and that the beautiful ship in which most of us had been
securely asleep within half an hour was gone for ever. There was an
awful silence in our boat, and such a kind of palsy on the rowers and the
man at the rudder, that I felt they were scarcely keeping her before the
sea.
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