points,
overhauling gear, and generally preparing to clothe the frigate with
canvas. By the time that she had paid square off before the wind all
was ready, the loosened canvas was bellying out as though impatient to
be doing its duty once more, loosened ropes were streaming in the gale,
the men had laid in off the yards, and the three topsails went soaring
away to the mastheads simultaneously; the fore and main tacks were
boarded and the sheets hauled aft; the topgallantsails were in like
manner all sheeted home and hoisted at the same instant, the two jibs
went sliding up their stays, slatting thunderously the while and
threatening to snap the booms, until their sheets were tautened, and
away flew the _Europa_, like a started fawn, leaping and plunging
through and over the mountainous seas, with a bow-wave roaring and
foaming to the height of her hawse-pipes, and with the wind broad over
her larboard quarter.

To any one unaccustomed to the sea the change thus wrought in the course
of a few short minutes would have seemed marvellous, almost miraculous,
indeed; for whereas while we were hove-to, head to wind and sea, the
plunging of the ship had been so furious that it was only with the
utmost difficulty even the most seasoned among us could maintain our
footing; while the howling and shrieking of the wind aloft, and the
savage force with which it struck us when the frigate rolled to
windward, irresistibly suggested the idea that we were in the grip of a
hurricane; now, when we were scudding away almost dead before it, the
gale seemed to have suddenly softened to the strength of no more than a
moderate breeze; there were no repetitions of those sickening lee
lurches as the ship was flung aloft on the steep breast of a
mountainous, swift-running sea, but, in place of it, a gentle,
rhythmical, pendulum-like swinging roll, and a long, easy, gliding rush
forward, with an acre of foam seething and hissing about our bows as
those same steep, mountainous seas caught us under the quarter and
hurled us headlong forward with our bow-wave roaring and boiling ahead
of us, glass-smooth, and clear as crystal.

There were but two drawbacks to our satisfaction, one of which was that
the weather still remained so exasperatingly thick that we had not been
able to get a further glimpse of the strange ship, while the other was
that we only knew our position very approximately, and that by dead
reckoning only. This last would have give