fling over
us, square off the starboard beam, causing the foresail to fill suddenly
with a report like that of a gun, and careening the schooner to her
covering board.

"Hard up with your helm, my man; hard up, and let her pay off before
it!" I shouted to the man at the helm, while the sound that I had heard
increased rapidly in volume, and a long line of white foam, rendered
luminous by the phosphorescent state of the water, appeared broad on our
starboard beam, sweeping down upon us with appalling velocity.
Fortunate was it for us that a preliminary puff had come to help us, for
it lasted just long enough to permit the little hooker to gather
steerage way and partially to pay off, far enough, that is to say, to
bring the onrushing hurricane well over her starboard quarter. Indeed,
had the gale happened to strike us square abeam, and with no way on the
ship, I am convinced that she must have inevitably turned turtle with
us. As it was, when, a few minutes later, the wind swooped down upon us
with the fury of a famished wild beast leaping upon its prey, and with a
mad babel of terrifying howls and shrieks that utterly baffles
description, the little vessel heeled down beneath its first stroke
until her lee rail was buried, and the water rose to the level of her
hatchway coamings; and but for the fact that she was at that moment not
only forging ahead, but also paying off, there would have been an end of
all hands, then and there. For what seemed to be, in our anxious
condition, a veritable age, but which was probably no more than a brief
half-minute, the little vessel lay there, quivering in every timber, and
seemed paralysed with terror, as though she were a sentient thing. The
wind yelled and raved through her rigging, and the spindrift and scud-
water--showing ghostly in the phosphorescent light emitted by the
tormented waters--flew over us in blinding, drenching showers. Then,
with a sudden jerk the schooner rose almost upright and, with the water
foaming about her bows to the level of her head rails, she sped away to
leeward at a pace that seemed absolutely impossible to even so swift a
craft as she had proved herself to be.

We scudded thus before the gale for nearly an hour, when, availing
ourselves of a temporary lull in its fury, we brought the schooner to
the wind and hove her to on the starboard tack; but, even then, so
tremendous was the force of the wind that, although she showed to it
nothing but a