g-point; and the howling blast, loaded with
spindrift and scud-water, seemed to pierce the adventurers to their very
marrow, while, notwithstanding the care with which they were wrapped up,
the continuous pouring of the sea over them soon wet them to the skin.

But the serious discomfort to which they had voluntarily exposed
themselves, so far from damping their ardour only increased it. As the
veteran Bill, standing there at the tiller exposed to the full fury of
the tempest, with the tiller-ropes pulling and jerking at his hands
until they threatened to cut into the bone, felt his wet clothing
clinging to his skin, and his sea-boots gradually filling with water, he
pictured to himself a group of poor terror-stricken wretches clinging
despairingly to a shattered wreck out there upon the cruel sands, with
the merciless sea tugging at them fiercely, and the wind chilling the
blood within their veins until, perchance, their benumbed limbs growing
powerless, their hold would relax and they would be swept away; and as
the dismal scene rose before his mental vision he tautened up the
tiller-ropes a trifle, the smack's head fell off perhaps half a point,
and the wind striking more fully upon the straining canvas, she went
surging out to seaward like a startled steed, her hull half buried in a
whirling chaos of flying foam.

Old Bill, the leader of this desperate expedition, was a fisherman in
winter and a yachtsman in summer, as indeed were most of the crew of the
_Seamew_ on this eventful night. Many a hard-fought match had Bill
sailed in, and more than one flying fifty had he proudly steered, a
winner, past the flag-ship; but his companions agreed, as they crouched
shivering under the bulwarks, that he never handled a craft better or
more boldly than he did the _Seamew_ on that night. One good stretch to
the eastward, until the "Middle" light bore well upon their weather
quarter, and the helm was put down; the smack tacked handsomely, though
she shipped a sea and filled her deck to the gunwale in the operation,
and then away she rushed on the other tack, with the light bearing well
upon the lee bow.

In less than an hour from the time of starting the light ship was
reached; and as the smack, luffing into the wind, shaved close under the
vessel's stern with all her canvas ashiver, Bill's stentorian voice
pealed out--

"_Middle_, ahoy! where a way's the wrack?"

"About a mile and half to the nor'ard, on the weather si