THE accompanying graphic narrative of a fearful storm and a noble rescue in mid-Atlantic appeared some months ago in the Daily Telegraph under the signature of " Seafarer." No one can read this in- teresting account without feeling that the race of British sailors is as stalwart at the present day as at any previous period in their history, and that the seamen of the future will not lack graphic and truthful writers of their deeds. Associated with the determined courage that has always been their distinguished characteristic, we now often find intelligence, skill, and the promptings of a generous heart.

" From time to time stories of acts of heroism performed at sea by sailors find their way into the newspapers. Some of these acts are very splendid illustrations of bravery, and, as we read them, we speculate perforce upon the reason why the modern British sailor is declared to be, in professional, moral, and physical respects, inferior to his pre- decessors. Some people tell us that, what with steam, mixed crews, and new-fangled ways, the British mariner is no longer a real sailor, and that the race of hold and kindhearted; British Tars has vanished, never to reappear. But Jack, as all the world knows, has always had an easy way with him; and his method of dealing with the current notions concerning his character—which, to he sure, nobody can satisfactorily account for, and to the accuracy of which nobody can be got to swear, is both original and modest. He does not write long letters to the papers. He does not try to look like a man who can dance a hornpipe. But from time to time—as often, indeed, as he gets the chance—he performs an action of which the noble- ness and the heroism are not at all to be measured by the quality and extent of the paragraphs in which the deed is related. The pity is that so very little of what he does on the high seas ever reaches the public eye. The soldier has his news- paper correspondent; but Jack gets no better glorification than the dry, unsentimental abstract from the log-book. Some of these days, perhaps, Jack may be able to keep a reporter of his own; until then he must be satisfied to continue bravely working and nobly acting in obscurity, very little known, and when known decidedly misunderstood, the victim of traditions utterly irrational among a maritime people like ourselves, very rarely chronicled, and when chronicled, always briefly.

" Quite recently a very touching and inspiriting drama has been enacted upon the high seas. The official report of it was no doubt printed in the shipping papers, but those organs are read almost exclusively by skippers, to whom such professional records are a familiar study that excites no other emotion than undemonstrative approval of the conduct of sailors who do their duty, and hearty disgust at the sailors who don't. The majority of our readers will probably, therefore, hear of this maritime incident for the first time to-day. The narrative is, however, quite a typical one,, and its best merit perhaps, lies in its exemplification of Jack's ordinary behaviour when afloat.

" On a certain Saturday, the well-known Cunard steamship Parthia was between four and five hun- dred miles distant from the west coast of Ireland, having sailed from the port of Boston on the pre- vious Saturday. For some hours a low barometer had given warning of a coming gale. The breeze was fresh on the port quarter, with a long follow- ing sea, over which, under the impulse of propeller and canvas, the beautifully moulded hull of the great steamship rushed like a locomotive, raising a roar of thunder at her bows and carving out the green, glass-clear water with her stem into two oil-smooth combers which broke just abaft the fore-rigging and rushed with a swirl and brilliance of foam to join the long, glittering snow-line of the wake astern. There was a piebald sky, the blue in it tarnished and faint, and under it, like a scattering of brown smoke, the scud went floating swiftly. In the south and west the aspect of the heavens was portentous enough, with a leaden deadness of colour and a line of horizon as sharply marked as a ruling in ink. The gale was evidently to come from this quarter; and, sure enough, be- fore eight bells in the afternoon watch, it was blowing a hurricane from the S.S.W. The fury of the wind raised a tremendous sea. The Parthia ran for a time; but running is not the remedy prescribed to captains who are caught in a circular storm-, and, shortly after four o'clock, the helm of the steamer was "put down and her head pointed to the seas. To understand the meaning of ' meet- ing the full force of a gale,' one should be hove to in a cyclone in the Atlantic. An Atlantic sea cannot be compared for stupendousness with a Pacific sea; such a sea, for instance, as a heavy westerly gale will raise off Cape Horn or Cape Leeuwin. But there are few sailors acquainted with both oceans who would not rather encounter a gale in the South Pacific than a gale in the North Atlantic. The blow of an Atlantic wave seems full of a force and spiteful fury peculiar to itself. The intervals between the surges appear to bear no proportion to the height and velocity of the seas. In the Pacific a ship hove to rises and falls with the regularity of a pendulum. In the Atlantic she dances a wild and frightful dance. Whilst the bow is under water, the foam is blowing over the starboard quarter from the crest of a sea that threatens the wheel; and when you can touch the water over the taffirail, and the bowsprit forks up perpendicu- larly from the skyward-flying head, the vessel is beam-ended by a tremendous blow upon the port broadside—in short, you never know where an Atlantic sea is going to strike you next. The Parthia's passengers were below, considerately battened down by order of Captain M'Kaye, the commander of the vessel, so that they should not be washed overboard or drowned in the cabins, for now that the steamer's bow was pointed at the sea she was just one smother of froth from the eyes to the rudder-head. Her curtseying might have looked graceful at a distance, but it was a tre- mendous experience to those who had to keep tune to her dance. Every now and again she would 'dish' a whole green sea forward—taking it in just as you would dip a pail into water—a sea that immediately turned the decks into a small raging ocean as high as a man's waist. As she rolled she shattered the furious tide against her bulwarks, where it broke into smoke and was swept away in clouds, like volumes of steam, for a whole cable- length astern. The grinding and straining of the hull, the hollow, muffled, vibratory note of the engines, the booming of the mighty surges against the resonant fabric, the screaming of the wind through the iron-stiff standing-rigging, and the enduring thunder of the tempest hurtling through the sky, completed to the ear the tremendous scene of warfare submitted to the eye in the picture of black heavens and white waters, and struggling, smothered, goaded ship.

"The Parthia lay hove to for six hours. At ten o'clock at night the gale broke, the wind sen- sibly moderated, the steamer was brought to her course, and went rolling heavily over the immense and powerful ocean swell which the cyclone had left behind it. The night passed ; Sunday morn- ing came with a benediction in the shape of a warm, bright sun. But the swell was still exceed- ingly heavy. Indeed, old Neptune could not forget his furious tussle, and the fierce, indignant heaving of his bosom promised to last for a good spell yet. It was shortly after two bells (nine o'clock), when the look-out man reported a vessel away on the lee bow, apparently hull down. Some of the passengers were on deck; but sighting a vessel at sea is no longer the interesting incident it formerly was, and the distant ship excited very little attention. As she was gradually hove up, however, by the approach of the Parthia, those who had sailor's eyes in their heads perceived that she was a vessel in distress, and that if any human beings were aboard of her, their plight would be one of the most miserable in the whole long cata- logue of nautical miseries. She was water-logged, and so low in the water that she buried her bulwarks •with eveiy roll. Sue had all three masts standing; but her yards were boxed about anyhow, her running rigging in bights, with ends of it trailing overboard; her canvas was rudely fnrled, but she had a fragment of her fore-topmast  staysail hoisted, as well as a small storm staysail, and she looked to be hove to. Her aspect, had she been encountered as a derelict, was monrnf ul enough to have set a sailor musidg for an hour ; but -when it -was discovered that there were living people on her, she took an extraordinary and tragical significance. No colours were hoisted to express her condition ; but then no colours were needful. Her story wanted no better telling than was found in the suggestion of the small crowd of human heads on her deck watching the Parthia, in the dull and deadly lifting of the dark volumes of water against her sides, in the gushing of clear cascades from the scupper holes as she leaned wearily over to the fold of the tall swell that threatened to overwhelm her, and in the sluggish waving of her naked spars under the sky. Twenty- two people could be counted aboard of her. All these had to be saved, but it was very well understood by every man belonging to the Parthia that they could only be saved at the risk of the lives of the boat's crew that should put oft for them, for the swell was still violent to an extent beyond any- thing that can "be conveyed in words. As the Parthia, with her propeller languidly revolving, sank into a hollow, a wall of water stood between her and the barque, and the ill-fated vessel became invisible; then in another moment, hove high, the people on board the steamer could look down from their poised deck upon the half-drowned hull and the soaked, clinging, and pale-faced crew as you look upon a housetop in a valley from the side of a hill. The serious danger lay in lowering a boat.

But Jack is not of a deliberative turn of mind when something that ought to be done waits for him to do it. Volunteers were forthcoming. The order was given. Eight hands sprang aft and seated themselves in the Life-boat, and the third officer, Mr. William Williams, took his place in the stern-sheets. It was one of those moments when the bravest man in the world will hold his breath.

There swang this boat's crew at the davits ; the ends of the falls in the hands of men waiting for the right second to lower away. One dark green f oamless swell, in whole huge mountains of water, rose and sank below ; too much hurry, the least delay, any lack of coolness, of judgment, of per- ception of the exactly right thing to do, and it was a hundred to one if the next minute did not see the boat dashed into staves, and her crew squattering and drowning among the fragments.

The due command was coolly given; the sheaves of the fall-blocks rattled on their pins, and the boat sank down to the water's edge. A vast swell hove her high, almost to the level of the spot where she had been hanging, and, quick as mortal hands can move, the blocks were unhooked—but only just in time. Then a strong shove drove her clear, and in a moment she was heading for the wreck, now vanishing as though she had been wholly swallowed up by the tall green sparkling ridge that rose between her and the steamer, then tossed like a cork upon a mountainous pinnacle, with half her keel out of water. She had been well stocked with lines and life-buoys, for it was clearly seen that the pouring waters would never permit her to come within a pistol-shot of the barque, and the suspense among the passengers amounted to an agony as they wondered within themselves how those sailors would rescue the poor helpless creatures who watched them from the foamy decks of the almost submerged wreck.

They followed the boat vanishing and reappear- ing, the very pulsation of their hearts almost arrested at moments when the little craft made a headlong, giddy swoop into a prodigious hollow and was lost to view, until presently they per- ceived that the men had ceased to row. It was then seen that the third mate was hailing the crew of the barque. Presently they saw one of the shipwrecked sailors heave a coil of line towards the boat; it was caught, a life-buoy bent on to it, and hauled aboard the wreck. To this life-buoy was attached a second line, the end of which was retained by the people in the boat. One of the men on the wreck put the life-buoy over his shoulders, and in an instant flung himself into the sea and was dragged smartly but carefully into the boat. The Parthia's passengers now under- stood how the men were to be saved. One by one the shipwrecked seamen leapt into the water, until eleven of them had been dragged into the Parthia's boat. This number made a load, and, with a cheery call to those who were to be left behind for a short while, Mr. Williams headed for the steamer. The deep boat approached the Parthia slowly; but, meanwhile, Captain M'Kaye's fore- sight had provided for the perilous and difficult job of getting the rescued men on board the steamer. A whip was rove at the f oreyard-ann, under which the rising and falling boat was sta- tioned by means of her oars ; one end of the whip knotted into a bowline was overhauled into the boat and slipped over the shoulders of a man, and at a signal a dozen or more of the Parthia's crew ran him up and swayed him in. In this way the eleven men were safely landed on the deck of the steamer. The boat then returned to the wreck, the rest of the crew were dragged from her by means of the buoys and life-lines, and hoisted, along with six of the Parthia's men, out of the boat by the yard-arm whip. But not yet was this perilous and nobly-executed mission completed.

There was still the boat to run up to the davits.

All the old fears recurred as she was brought alongside with Mr. Williams and two men in her.

But Jack has a marvellously quick hand and a steady pulse; the blocks were swiftly hooked into the boat, and soon she soared like a bird to the davits under the. strong running pull of a number of men before the swell that followed her could rise to the height of the chain plates.

To appreciate the pathos and pluck o£ an adven- venture of this kind, a man must have served as a spectator or actor in some such a scene. Words have but little virtue when deeds are to be told whose moving powers and ennobling inspirations lie in a performance that may as fitly be described in one as in a hundred lines. Such as remember the faces of those shipwrecked Englishmen and Canadians, the aspect of them as they were hoisted one by one over the Parthia's side •, the bewildered rolling of their eyes incredulous of their miracu- lous preservation; their expression of suffering slowly yielding to perception of the new lease of life mercifully accorded them, graciously and nobly earned for them ; their streaming garments, their hair clotted like sea-weed upon their pale foreheads; the passionate pressing forward of the crew and passengers of the Parthia to rejoice with the poor fellows on their salvation from one of the most lamentable dooms to which the sea can sen- tence, will wonder at the insufliciency of this record of as brilliant and hearty though simple a deed as any which makes up the stirring annals of the maritime life. But told, even as it is here told, the public may think it a story worth the telling, if only that it should serve to make mercantile Jack better known and more respected. The sea is the noblest theatre we have, and of the dramas enacted upon it Englishmen, at least, should not sit unmoved spectators. Nor would they if only novelists and dramatists would do him justice, and, looking no longer to the fictions of landsmen for ideas of the British sailor, study him in his fore- castle and follow him upon the high seas.