chop round, or by the continuance of the westerly tempest with a bitterer spite in the renewed rush of it. The lull may have lasted ten or fifteen seconds. In that time I do not know that there was a breath of air to be felt outside the violent eddyings and draughts occasioned by the sickening motions of the barque. I looked up at the sky, and spied the leanest phantom of a star that glimmered for the space of a single swing of a pendulum, and then vanished behind a rushing roll of vapour of a midnight hue, winging with incredible velocity from the land.

So insupportable was the movement of the deck that I was forced to support myself by a belaying-pin, or I must have been thrown. My companion clung to a similar pin close beside me. The thunder of running and colliding waters rose into that magical hush of tempest; I could hear the booming of the surf as far as Hurricane Point and the caldron-like noises of the waters round about the rocks astern of us.

'Has the storm ceased?' cried my companion. 'Oh, beloved father, we may be spared yet!' he added, extending his disengaged hand towards the deck-house, as he apostrophized the helpless man who lay there.

Amazed as I was by this instant cessation of the gale, I could yet find mind enough to be struck by my companion's manner, by his words, and now, I may say, by his voice also. I was about to address him; but, as my lips parted, there was a vivid flash of lightning that threw out the whole scene of bay, cliff, foreshore, and town, with the line of the horizon seawards, in a dazzle of violet; a crash of thunder followed; but, before its ear-splitting reverberation had ceased, the echoes of it were drowned in the bellowing of the gale coming directly off the land.

What is there in words to express the fury of this outfly? It met the heave of the landward-running seas, and swept them into smoke, and the air grew as white and thick with spume as though a heavy snowstorm were blowing horizontally along. It took the barque and swung her; her labouring was so prodigious as she was thrust by this fresh hurricane broadside round to the surge, that I imagined every second she would founder under my feet. I felt a shock: my companion cried, 'One of the cables has parted!' A moment later I felt the same indescribable tremble running through the planks on which we stood.

'Is that the other cable gone, do you think?' I shouted.

'There is a lead-line over the side,' he cried; 'it will tell us if we are adrift.'

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