and steady, a considerable
swell had been following us, warning of trouble somewhere to
northward; and on the eighth night it overtook us.

"It was--not to speak irreverently--in itself ten times more trouble
than ten thousand Grimalsons could have raised; a tearing gale of
wind which, all of a sudden, converted the oily summits of the swell
into bursting white waves. I don't suppose the height from trough to
summit actually increased as it did to view, but in twenty minutes,
and with night shutting down the lid on us, each successive wave
astern seemed to grow taller by feet. The rain appeared to have no
effect in flattening their caps, though it came down with a weight
that knocked half the breath out of our bodies, and with a roar above
which it was hard to hear an order shouted. We could spy the other
boats' lanterns but at long intervals, partly because of this
down-pouring curtain and partly, I suppose, because when we topped up
over a crest they would nine times out of ten be hidden in a trough,
dipping or rising.

"We carried, by Captain Macnaughten's orders, a hurricane lamp on our
fore-stay. Someone had lit a second amidships, where we huddled in
oilskins and under tarpaulins like a congregation of eels. . . .
Jarvis, our best seaman, had the tiller. He sat, all hunched,
crouching forward over a third small lamp--the binnacle lamp with
which our boat, like the others, was providentially fitted.
The rain, however, beat on its glass in such sheets that he could not
possibly have read the compass card floating by the wick. Nor--I am
sure--was he trying to read it. He just sat and steered by the feel
of the seas as they lurched ahead and sank abaft. The lamplight
glowed up on his cheek-bones, but was lost under the pent of his
sou'wester, which had a sort of crease or channel in its fore-flap,
that shed down the rain in a flood. Though we lay, we passengers, on
the bottom boards we could see nothing of his face, so far forward he
bent.

"Then Grimalson lost his head. He was seated at Jarvis's shoulder in
the stern-sheets, with a hefty seaman (Prout by name) on his other
hand tending the sheet--the both of 'em starboard of Jarvis. Of a
sudden he started up, reached forward, snatched the midships light,
and held it aloft against the wall of a tremendous sea arching
astern. At sight of it the fool lost all his remaining nerve, and
yelled to the two seamen forward to lash a couple of oars to the
pain