Our boat was small for a craft of her character, but a noble, brave, nimble fabric, as had been again and again proved; and every man of us, allowing that good usage was given her, had such confidence in the Janet, that we would not have exchanged her for the largest, handsomest, and best-tested boat on the coast of the United Kingdom. You would have understood her merits had you been with us on this night. I was at the yoke-lines; Pentreath, my second in command, sat with his foot against the side, gripping the foresheet, ready to let go in an instant; the mizzen had been hoisted, and the rest of the men, crouching down upon the thwarts, sat staring ahead, with iron countenances, with never so much as a stoop among them to the hardest wash of the surge that might sweep with a wild hissing shriek athwart their sea-helmets and half fill the boat as it came bursting in smoke over the weather-bow, till, for the space of a wink or two, the black gale was as white as a snowstorm overhead.

As we 'reached' out the sea grew weightier. Never before had I known a greater sea in that bay. The ridges seemed to stand up to twice the height of our masts; every peak boiled, and as we rose to the summit of it, the boat was smothered in the foam of her own churning, and in the headlong, giddy, dazzling rush into which she soared, with the whole weight of the gale in her fragment of lug bowing her over and sending her, as you might have believed, gunwale under down the long, indigo slant of the under-running billow.

We held on, all as mute as death in the boat. From time to time as we rose to the head of a sea I would take a look in the direction of the barque, and catch a glimpse of the windy spark of her flare, or of the meteoric sailing of a rocket over her mastheads. There should have been a moon, but the planet was without power to strike the faintest illumination into the heaps and rags of vapours which were pouring up like smoke over the edge of the raging Atlantic horizon. The picture of the parlour I had just left would sometimes arise before me: I figured my mother peering out at the black and throbbing scene of bay; I imagined good Mr. Trembath at her side, uttering such words of comfort and of hope as occurred to him; but such fancies as these seemed to be beaten away by the breath of the hurricane, as rapidly as they were formed. Should we be in time? If the vessel's cables parted she was doomed. Nay; if she should continue to drag another quarter of an hour, she would be on to the Twins, and go to pieces as a child's house of bricks falls to the touch of a hand!

'Ready about!' I roared.

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