to turn a man's hair grey. Yet, after watching the movements of
the schooner for about half an hour, and noting how, time after time,
when the little barkie seemed to be trembling on the very brink of
destruction, she unfailingly came to in time to avoid being overwhelmed,
I grew so inured to the experience that I found myself able to go below
and make an excellent breakfast with perfect equanimity.

It was about five bells in the forenoon watch, and it had by that time
grown light enough for us to discern objects at a distance of about a
mile, when, as the schooner was tossed aloft to the crest of an
exceptionally gigantic wave, Simpson--whose watch it was--and I
simultaneously caught sight for a moment of something that, indistinctly
seen as it was through the dense clouds of flying scud-water, had the
appearance of a ship of some kind, directly to windward of us. The next
instant we lost sight of it as we sank into the trough between the wave
that had just passed beneath us and that which was sweeping down upon
us. When we topped this wave soon afterwards, we again caught sight of
the object, and this time held her in view long enough to identify her
as a large brigantine, hove-to, like ourselves, on the starboard tack,
under a storm-staysail. Unlike ourselves, however, she had all her top-
hamper aloft, forward, and seemed to be making desperately bad weather
of it. The glimpses that we caught of her were of course very brief,
and at comparatively long intervals, for it was only when both craft
happened to be on the summit of a wave at the same moment that we were
able to see her. Yet two facts concerning her gradually became clear to
us, the first of which was that she was undoubtedly a slaver--so much
her short, stumpy masts and the enormous longitudinal spread of her
yards told us,--the second was that she was steadily settling down to
leeward at a more rapid rate than ourselves, as was only to be expected
from the fact that she was exposing much more top-hamper to the gale
than we were. It would not be long, therefore, before she would drive
away to leeward of us, probably passing us at no very great distance.

Now, although we were fully convinced that the craft in sight was a
slaver, yet we had no thought whatever of attempting to take her just
then, for the very simple reason that to do so under the circumstances
would be a manifest impossibility. In such an awful sea as was then
running we could only