"We've tried our best to come up with her, at any rate."

"We have that, and I daresay a good many would call us foolhardy for
carrying on as we've done so long. However, I'm going to abandon the
chase now and bear up again on our proper course, my boy, and the devil
of a job that will be, I know, in the teeth of this gale!"

So saying, the skipper, grasping the handle of the engine-room
telegraph, which led up through a tube at the end of the bridge,
signalled to those in charge below to slow down to half speed.

"Down with the helm, quartermaster!" he cried to the man at the wheel,
and, at the same moment holding up his hand to attract the attention of
old Masters, who had returned to his station on the fo'c's'le, greatly
exercised in his mind by what had recently occurred, he sang out in a
voice of thunder that reached the knightheads and made the boatswain
skip: "Haul in your jib sheet and flatten those staysails sharp! I want
to bring her round to the wind handsomely, to prevent taking in another
of those green seas aboard when we get broadside-on. Look smart,
bo'sun, and keep your eye on her. Keep your eye on her, d'you hear?
It's ticklish work, you know. Look-out sharp or she'll broach to!"

Far as the eye could reach, the storm-tossed surface of the deep was
white with foam, white as a snowfield, and boiling with rage and fury.

The bank of blue-black cloud that had rested along the horizon to
leeward had now melted away in some mysterious fashion or other, and the
sky became as clear as a bell, only some wind-driven scrap of semi-
transparent white vapour sweeping occasionally across the face of the
pale, sickly-looking moon that looked down on the weird scene in a sort
of menacing way; while, in lieu of the two or three odd sentinels that
had previously peeped out from the firmament, all the galaxies of heaven
were, at this moment, in their myriads above, spangling the empyrean
from zenith to pole.

But the gale!

While running before the wind, the wind, although it had ballooned our
sails out to bursting point, brushing us along at a wild, mad-cap rate,
and buffeting the boisterous billows on either hand, scooping them up
from the depths of the ocean and piling them in immense waves of angry
water that rolled after us, striving to overwhelm us, we could hardly,
even while taking advantage of it, appreciate its awful and tremendous
force.

On coming about, however, and facing it, the case was vas