upon, if the third has to take the wheel, trusting to chance to help us, I repeat that the odds against our bringing the ship home are one thousand to one. We shall be at the mercy of every gale that rises, and end in becoming a kind of phantom ship, chased about the ocean just as the wind happens to blow us."

"Well, sir," said he, "I dare say you're right, and I'll say no more about it. Now, about turnin' in. I'll keep here if you like to go below for a couple of hours. Cornish can stand by to rouse you up."

I had another look to windward before making up my mind to go below. A strong sea was rising, and the wind blew hard enough to keep one leaning against it. There was no break in the sky, and the horizon was thick, but the look-out was not worse than it had been half an hour before.

We were, however, snug enough aloft, if not very neat; the bunt of the mainsail, indeed, looked rather shaky, but the other sails lay very secure upon the yards; and this being so, and the gale remaining steady, I told the boatswain to keep the ship to her present course, and went below, yawning horribly and dead wearied.

I had slept three-quarters of an hour, when I was awakened by the steward rushing into my cabin and hauling upon me like a madman. Being scarcely conscious, I imagined that the mutineers had got on board again, and that here was one of them falling upon me; and having sense enough, I suppose, in my sleepy brain to make me determine to sell my life at a good price, I let fly at the steward's breast and struck him so hard that he roared out, which sound brought me to my senses at once.

"What is it?" I cried.

"Oh, sir," responded the steward, half dead with terror and the loss of breath occasioned by my blow, "the ship's sinking, sir! We're all going down! I've been told to fetch you up. The Lord have mercy upon us!"

I rolled on to the deck in my hurry to leave the bunk, and ran with all my speed up the companion ladder; nor was the ascent difficult, for the ship was on a level keel, pitching heavily indeed, but rolling slightly.

Scarcely, however, was my head up through the companion, when I thought it would have been blown off my shoulders. The fury and force of the wind was such as I had never before in all my life experienced.

Both the boatswain and Cornish were at the wheel, and, in order to reach them, I had to drop upon my hands and knees and crawl along the deck. When near them I took a grip of the grating and looked around me.

The first thing I saw was that the mainsail had blown away from most of the gaskets, and was thundering in a thousand rags upon the yard. The foresail was split in halves, and the port mizzen-topsail sheet had carried away, and the sail was pealing like endless discharges of musketry.

All the spars were safe still. The lee braces had been let go, the helm put up, and the ship was racing before a hurricane as furious as a tornado, heading south-east, with a wilderness of foam boiling under her bows.

This, then, was the real gale which the thunder-storm had been nearly all night bringing up. The first gale was but a summer breeze compared to it.

The clouds lay like huge fantastic rolls of sheet lead upon the sky; in some quarters of the circle drooping to the water-line in patches and spaces ink-black. No fragment of blue heaven was visible; and yet it was lighter than it had been when I went below.

The ensign, half-masted, roared over my head; the sea was momentarily growing heavier, and, as the ship pitched, she took the water in broad sheets over her forecastle.

The terrible beating of the mizzen-topsail was making the mizzen-mast, from the mastcoat to the royal mast-head, jump like a piece of whalebone. Although deafened, bewildered, and soaked through with the screaming of the gale, the thunder of the torn canvas, and the spray which the wind tore out of the sea and hurtled through the air, I still preserved my senses; and perceiving that the mizzen-topmast would go if the sail were not got rid of, I crawled on my hands and knees to the foot of the mast, and let go the remaining sheet.

With appalling force, and instantaneously, the massive chain was torn through the sheave-hole, and in less time than I could have counted ten, one half the sail had blown into the main-top, and the rest streamed like the ends of whipcord from the yard.

I crawled to the fore-end of the poop to look at the mainmast; that stood steady; but whilst I watched the foremast, the foresail went to pieces, and the leaping and plunging of the heavy blocks upon it made the whole mast quiver so violently that the top-gallant and royal-mast bent to and fro like a bow strung and unstrung quickly.

I waited some moments, debating whether or not to let go the fore-topsail sheets; but reflecting that the full force of the wind was kept away from it by the main-topsail, and that it would certainly blow to pieces if I touched a rope belonging to it, I dropped on my hands and knees again and crawled away aft.

"I saw it coming!" roared the bo'sun in my ear. "I had just time to sing out to Cornish to slacken the lee-braces, and to put the helm hard over."

"We shall never be able to run!" I bellowed back. "She'll be pooped as sure as a gun when the sea comes! We must heave her to whilst we can. No use thinking of the fore-topsail—it must go!"

"Look there!" shouted Cornish, dropping the spokes with one hand to point.

There was something indeed to look at; one of the finest steamers I had ever seen, brig-rigged, hove to under a main-staysail. She seemed, so rapidly were we reeling through the water, to rise out of the sea.

She lay with her bowsprit pointing across our path, just on our starboard bow. Lying as she was, without way on her, we should have run into her had the weather been thick, as surely as I live to say so.

We slightly starboarded the helm, clearing her by the time we were abreast by not more than a quarter of a mile. But we dared not have hauled the ship round another point; for, with our braces all loose, the first spilling of the sails would have brought the yards aback, in which case indeed we might have called upon God to have mercy on our souls, for the ship would not have lived five minutes.

There was something fascinating in the spectacle of that beautiful steamship, rolling securely in the heavy sea, revealing as she went over to starboard her noble graceful hull, to within a few feet of her keel. But there was also something unspeakably dreadful to us to see help so close at hand, and yet of no more use than had it offered a thousand miles away.

There was a man on her bridge, and others doubtless watched our vessel unseen by us; and God knows what sensations must have been excited in them by the sight of our torn and whirling ship blindly rushing before the tempest, her sails in rags, the half-hoisted ensign bitterly illustrating our miserable condition, and appealing, with a power and pathos no human cry could express, for help which could not be given.

"Let us try and heave her to now!" I shrieked, maddened by the sight of this ship whirling fast away on our quarter. "We can lie by her until the gale has done and then she will help us!"

But the boatswain could not control the wheel alone: the blows of the sea against the rudder made it hard for even four pairs of hands to hold the wheel steady. I rushed to the companion and bawled for the steward, and when, after a long pause,