"A man! A man! Save him!"

As she spoke, a huge wave rolled in, and shot up the sloping end of
the point in a broad sheet of foam.

And out of it struggled, on hands and knees, a human figure. He looked
wildly up, and round, and then his head dropped again on his breast;
and he lay clinging with outspread arms, like Homer's polypus in the
Odyssey, as the wave drained back, in a thousand roaring cataracts,
over the edge of the rock.

"Save him!" shrieked she again, as twenty men rushed forward--and
stopped short. The man was fully thirty yards from them: but close to
him, between them and him, stretched a long ghastly crack, some ten
feet wide, cutting the point across. All knew it: its slippery edge,
its polished upright sides, the seething cauldrons within it; and
knew, too, that the next wave would boil up from it in a hundred jets,
and suck in the strongest to his doom, to fall, with brains dashed
out, into a chasm from which was no return.

Ere they could nerve themselves for action, the wave had come. Up the
slope it went, one half of it burying the wretched mariner, and fell
over into the chasm. The other half rushed up the chasm itself, and
spouted forth again to the moonlight in columns of snow, in time to
meet the wave from which it had just parted, as it fell from above;
and then the two boiled up, and round, and over, and swirled along the
smooth rock to their very feet.

The schoolmistress took one long look; and as the wave retired, rushed
after it to the very brink of the chasm, and flung herself on her