TO SAVE GRANDMA.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1095, 12 September 1912, Page 4

TO SAVE GRANDMA.

A CHILD HKROINK

The little heroine of a steamship accident which took place in Boston Harbour recently, Dorothy Dockett, ten years old, of 6xo Riverside Drive, New York, who saved her grandmother, Mrs William H. Thompson, when both were thrown into the sea, told the story of the experience at the present residence of the iamily in Brookline. “Grandmother and I were sound asleep when something seemed to jar the boat so hard that we woke up,” she said, “Then there was a second shock, and grandmother and I both jumped out of our berths, and grandmother told me to get on some ot my clothes. She wrapped something around me and a steamer rug around herself, and we went up on deck. “It was pretty cold, and very dark, except where the steamer’s light shone. Everyone was awfully excited, but there was not any panic. Dots of people were calling out to each other, and there was a good deal of running back and forth.

“In a little while they told us to get into the boats. I did not want grandmother to get into the first boat, but someway we had to. We began to go down, and were going very smoothly, when all of a sudden something happened, and one end of the boat went down and the other stayed up, and we were all spilled out. “When I struck the water, I went right down over my head, and I iorgot I had on a life ‘preserver,’ and thought I was going clear away down to the bottom ot the ocean. But before I knew it I was up, and then I remembered I had on the life ‘preserver,’ and I knew that I ought to make a stroke.

“Several days ago mother came up from West Southport, where we had been staying ior six weeks, and when she left she told me to take good care of grandmother, so the first thing I thought of when I came up was grandmother. I looked all around, and kept crying out to her, and in a minute I found her.

“I caught hold of her, and we stayed tight close together. Then the boat came along, and a man pulled me into it, and told me to help bail out the boat, but I could not do that until grandmother was saved, you know, and I told the man I would if he would find her. He said he could not see her. “Grandmother had on a black coat, and it was so dark, but I could not let her not be saved, you know, and I kept screaming to

her, and she answered me sometimes, and after an awfully long time they found her, and tried to pull her in. “She had hold of a man, and I told her to let go, because if he went down he would pull her down with him, and she did as I said, and the men in the boat got hold of her arms and began to try to pull her in. “One of them said, ‘l’m afraid I shall pull your arras out. I’m so sorry,’ and grandmother told him never to mind, just help her into the boat.’’

Mr Thompson, at whose home on Riverside Drive Dorothy spends each winter, said that he surely thought his granddaughter was a child to be proud of. “Now that was an American thing, wasn’t it,” he said. “The little mite looking out for her grandmother, Well, I am glad everything came out right. “Yes, Dorothy is an active girl. She’s at home around boats and in the water. Her mother wrote us not long ago that she was teaching her more about the art of swimming. She’s been in a boat all this summer, and most of last. She has been able to swim for two years. Of course, she had a life preserver, and could have kept up quite a while, I count it most remarkable that she kept her nerve amid all of it.”