showing lights as a guide to her boat, which ought not to be
very far away. And why so deadly silent? I could not understand it.
But as these ideas flitted through my mind I came to the conclusion that
the correct thing to do was to close with her as quickly as possible by
making short tacks toward her. So I put down my helm and hove the boat
round upon the starboard tack, bringing the vague, black shadow about
two points on the weather bow. The flapping of the sails while the boat
was in stays awoke my companion, who sat up and, in a weak and husky
voice, asked me what was the matter.

"Nothing," I answered; "at least nothing of an alarming nature. The
fact is that I fancy I can see something, away out there on the weather
bow, and I have tacked the boat for the purpose of investigating the
object more closely."

"Whereabout is this object of which you speak?" she asked.

I pointed it out to her, and she almost immediately saw it. "Do you
imagine it to be a ship, Mr Conyers?" she inquired.

"I know not what else it can be," said I. "But," I added, "we must not
be too sanguine of help or rescue just yet. There are one or two points
in connection with that object that make me doubtful as to its being a
ship."

"What are they?" she quickly demanded.

I told her that one was the apparent immobility of the object; the other
being the fact that no lights were being displayed. And I explained
that the two together seemed incompatible with the supposition that the
object ahead was a ship, repeating to her, indeed, the arguments that
had flitted through my own mind only a few minutes before.

Yet with every fathom that the boat advanced, the shadow grew more
palpable, expanded, and approximated more closely to the appearance of a
vessel hove-to under bare poles. And at length, after several anxious
minutes of alternating hope and doubt, there arrived a moment when doubt
became no longer possible, for the shadow had finally resolved itself
into the silhouette of a brig under bare poles; even the thin lines of
the masts--which, by the way, looked stumpy, as though her
topgallant-masts were gone--were perceptible to my practised eye.

Without pausing to puzzle out a possible reason for the singular
condition of the vessel, I hastily resigned the yoke-lines to Miss
Onslow and, springing upon the mast thwart, proceeded to hail the brig
at the full power of my lungs, my delight at once more seeing a vessel
so clos