wn_,
for your life!" I grasped the spokes, throwing the momentary strength
of ten men into a frantic effort that sent the wheel whirling over at
lightning speed. The noble little ship quickly and gallantly answered
to the impulse, and, though pitching so desperately that she completely
smothered herself as far aft as the foremast, her bows gradually swept
round until they pointed straight out to seaward and away from the
boiling surf that actually swirled and seethed about her cutwater, as
though the poor little overdriven craft had suddenly realised her awful
peril and had swerved from it like a sentient thing.

"Man the braces, fore and main!" I shouted with frenzied eagerness.
"Round-in upon the starboard main and topsail braces, for your lives,
men; shift over the trysail-sheet like lightning! Hurrah, lads! over
with it before the gale strikes us again! Well there with the starboard
main-braces; haul taut and make fast to port; swing your head-yards; and
get the starboard staysail sheet aft. Here comes the wind again; but,
thank God, _we are saved_!"

No one but a sailor--and probably no sailor but he who has passed
through such an unique experience as I have just been endeavouring to
describe--can possibly understand the startling suddenness and the
astounding rapidity with which such an utterly unhoped-for and
unexpected change had been wrought in our situation. The whole thing
had happened with the breathless rapidity characteristic of the headlong
rush of succeeding events in a dream. At the very moment when I was
about to give the order which would have sent the ship flying before
wind and sea towards the beach, and insured her destruction, there had
occurred one of those sudden and unaccountable "breaks," or total
cessations of wind, that occasionally, though very rarely, occur for a
few brief moments in the midst of a raging tempest, and which are
sometimes succeeded by a total change in the direction of the wind when
it recommences to blow. These "breaks" are very similar in their
character and duration to the passage of "the eye" of a cyclone, with
which phenomenon, indeed, they are often confounded; and it was during
that brief lull that the helm had been put down, and the ship, by God's
mercy--though plunging so wildly in the seas that met her that I fully
expected to see her masts go over the bows--had been got round on the
other tack, with her head pointing to seaward before the recurrence of