His only course was to tack back and forth as carefully as possible, and wait for daylight,--as the French sailors were doing, with what patience they could command.
In less than half an hour, however, a pair of long, graceful, buoyant-looking life-boats, manned each with an officer and eight rowers, came shooting through the mist, in response to the repeated summons of the steamer's cannon.
"It's all right, now," said Dab.

"I knew they wouldn't be long in coming.

Let's find out where we are." That was easy enough.

The steamer had gone ashore on a sand-bar, a quarter of a mile from the beach, and a short distance from Seabright on the New Jersey coast; and there was no probability of any worse harm coming to her than the delay in her voyage, and the cost of pulling her out from the sandy bed into which she had so blindly thrust herself.

The passengers would, most likely, be taken ashore with their baggage, and sent on to the city overland.
"In fact," said Ford Foster, "a sand-bar isn't as bad for a steamer as a pig is for a locomotive." "The train you were wrecked in," said Dab, "was running fast.