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succeeding rush of air being of a few seconds' longer duration than the preceding one, and coming with greater strength and spite, thus enabling us at last to get steerage way upon the schooner and partially turn her stern toward the point from which we expected the outfly to come. And when presently it came roaring and howling and screaming down upon us, with such a medley of sound as might be expected from a legion of unchained furies, our port quarter was turned towards it, with the schooner in motion and paying off before it. Yet, even so, it swooped down upon us with such appalling violence that the little vessel careened until her lee sheer-poles were buried and the water was up to the coaming of the main hatch. But with way on her, her helm hard up, no after canvas set, and the hurricane dragging at her stout foresail, she could not help paying off, and after a long minute of heart-racking suspense, during which we momentarily expected her to keel-up with us, she suddenly righted and went flying away dead before the wind, with the water boiling under her bows up to the level of her head-boards. One of the _Martha Brown's_ good points was that she steered as handily as a little boat. I therefore had no difficulty in keeping her dead before the wind without assistance, although Cunningham stood by to lend me a hand should I chance to need any help. Also the water, apart from the boiling foam into which its surface was scourged by the hurricane, was perfectly smooth, the smallest suggestion of a wave crest being instantly seized by the wind and swept away to leeward in the form of fine, salt rain; indeed, the air was so full of spindrift and scudwater that I believed, even had it been daylight, we could not have seen farther than about two, or at most three, lengths from the ship. As it was, with the outfly of the hurricane that weird, unnatural, ruddy light of which I have spoken almost immediately died out from the sky, leaving the night as pitch-dark as before, save for the ghostly gleam of phosphorescent light which arose from the storm-swept ocean, and which gave the water, as far as it could be seen, the appearance as if moonlight were shining up through it. When we had been scudding for a full quarter of an hour before that raving, screaming, howling fury of wind I began momentarily to expect and look for some indication that the worst was over, and to hope that the wind would moderate sufficiently t
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