A terrible gale raged along the sea coast. In one bay it wrecked eighty-one vessels. While the storm was at its height, the Rising Sun, a stout brig, struck on Longrear Rock, a reef extending a mile from one side of the bay. She sank, leaving only her topmasts above the foaming waves.
The shore lifeboats were away rescuing wrecked crews. The only means of saving the men clinging to the swaying masts was the rocket apparatus. Before it could be adjusted one mast fell. Just as the rocket, bearing the life-line, went whizzing through the air, the other mast toppled over.
Sadly the rocket men began to draw in their line, when suddenly they felt that something was attached to it, and in a few minutes hauled on to the beach the apparently lifeless body of a sailor boy. Trained and tender hands worked, and in a short time he became conscious.
With wild amazement he gazed around on the crowd of kind and sympathizing friends. They raised him to his feet. He looked up into the weather-beaten face of the old fisherman near him and asked, “Where am I?”
“Thou art here, my boy.”
“Where’s the cap’n?”
“Drowned, my boy!”
“The mate then?”
“He’s drowned, too.”
“The crew?”
“They are lost, my boy; you are the only one saved.”
The boy stood overwhelmed for a few moments; then he raised both his hands and cried in a loud voice, “My mother’s been praying for me! My mother’s been praying for me!”
And then he dropped on his knees on the wet sand and hid his sobbing face in his hands.
Hundreds heard that day this tribute to a mother’s love, and to God’s faitullness in listening to a mother’s prayers.
The little fellow was taken to a house nearby, and in a few days was sent home to his mother’s cottage.
ML 06/14/1959