isted bodily out
of its lashings and swept overboard!

"Then a lull, while the sea got up and the ship dashed down on the other
side on her bow; then staggering back and making a stern-board till the
water was plunged up in a deluge over the poop. Recovering herself
again, and almost quivering on her beam-ends, the guns groaning and
creaking as the terrible strain came upon the breechings, with the shot
from the racks bounding about the decks, dinting holes in the solid oak
waterways big enough to wash your face in, and then hopping out of the
smashed half-ports to leeward. The spar-deck up to your armpits in
water, and every man of us holding on to the life-lines or standing
rigging like grim death, while all the time the roaring, thundering yell
of the hurricane taught us how powerless we were, by hand or voice, to
cope with the winds when they were let loose in all their might and
fury!

"Nor need I relate to you the scene presented below--mess-chests, bags,
tables, crockery, flying from deck and beam to stanchion, smashing about
in the most dangerous way, pell-mell, while the worst of the tempest
lasted. But, gentlemen, the 'Scourge' had a frame of live-oak, to say
nothing of two or three acres of tough yellow-pine timber in her, a good
deal of fibrous hemp to hold the masts up; and, moreover, she was well
manned, and, though I say it myself, she had a skillful captain and
thorough-bred officers, in whose sagacity the crew could rely, to manage
that old 'Scourge.'"

"That she had," exclaimed Hardy; "and the most skillful and the coolest
of them all was the first lieutenant!" The "Monongahela's" executive
officer here bounced off his chair as if he was prepared to fight any
man breathing who did not subscribe to that opinion.

"Well, my friends, that awful hurricane continued for about twenty
hours, from late one morning till the beginning of the next. As for day,
there was none; for the sea and black clouds made one long night of it.
Fortunately, too, we had been driven off shore, and when the murky gloom
broke away, and we were able to look around, our first anxiety was to
see what had become of the brigantine.

"Yes, and I truly believe, in all that turmoil of the elements, while we
were on the brink of foundering and going down to old Davy's locker,
that there was not an officer or man, from the captain to the cook, who
was not thinking of that pirate, and hoping that he might go down first.
I myself, howev