Through it she madly raced, with pallid clouds blowing about her bows, and white peaks hissing along her sides, and a wake of snow under her counter heaving to half the height of the mizzenmast with the hurl of the seas, and a ceaseless blowing of froth over our heads as the lad and I stood together grasping the wheel, steering the vessel into the darkness of the great Atlantic Ocean, with our eyes upon the compass-card, whose illuminated disc showed the course on which we were being flashed forwards by the storm to be a trifle south of west.

CHAPTER IV.

HELGA NIELSEN.

For full twenty minutes the lad and I clung to the helm without exchanging a word. The speed of the driven vessel rendered her motion comparatively easy, after the intolerable lurching and rolling and plunging of her as she lay at anchor or in the trough. She was swept onwards with such velocity that I had little or no fear of her taking in the seas over her stern, and she steered well, with but little wildness in the swerving of her bows, as was to be seen by the comparative regularity of the oscillation of the compass-card.

This running before the tempest, of course, diminished the volume and power of it, so far, I mean, as our own sensations were concerned; but the sight of the sea, as much of it at least as was visible, coupled with the thunder of the wind up aloft in the sky, and the prodigious crying and shrieking and shrilling of it in the rigging, was warrant enough that were we to heave the barque to we should find the hurricane harder now than it had been at any other time since it first came on to blow. Yet our racing before it, as I have said, seemed somewhat to lull it, and we could converse without having to cry out, though for twenty minutes we stood mute as statues waiting and watching.

At last my companion said to me: 'Have we passed that point which you spoke of, do you think?'

'Oh yes,' I answered. 'It would not be above two miles distant from the point where we broke adrift. Our speed cannot have been less than eight or nine knots. I should say Hurricane Point is a full mile away down on the quarter there.'

'I fear that we shall find the sea,' said he, 'grow terribly heavy as we advance.'

'Yes,' said I; 'but what is to be done? There is nothing for it but to advance. Suppose such another shift of wind as has just happened—what then? We should have a line of deadly shore right under our lee. No, we must hold on 

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