the companionway. The man ran on deck with the things.

'Can that be rain?' cried Helga.

Rain it was indeed! a very avalanche of wet, charged with immense hailstones. The roar of the smoking discharge upon the planks was absolutely deafening. It lasted about a couple of minutes, then ceased with startling suddenness, and you heard nothing but the surf-like moaning that had now gathered a deeper and a more thrilling note, mingled with the wild sobbing in the scuppers, and a melancholy hissing of wet as the water on the quarter-deck splashed from side to side to the light rolling of the barque. Yet fully another five minutes passed in quiet, while the growling of the thunder of the still distant storm-swept sea waxed fiercer and fiercer. It was as though one stood at the mouth of a tunnel and listened to the growing rattling and rumbling of a long train of goods waggons approaching in tow of a panting locomotive.

Then in a breath the wind smote the barque, and down she leaned to it. So amazingly violent was the angle, I do most truthfully believe that for the space of some twenty or thirty seconds the barque lay completely on her beam ends, as much so as if she were bilged high and dry upon a shoal, and there was a dreadful noise of water pouring in upon her deck from over the submerged lee main-deck rail.

Helga was to windward, and the table supported her, but the chair upon which I was seated broke away with me, and I fell sprawling upon my back amid a whole raffle of the contents of the table, which Punmeamootty had not yet removed. The full mess of it came headlong about me with a mighty smash; the beef, the ham, the bottle of brandy, now shivered into a thousand pieces, the jam pots, the biscuits, the knives and forks—all these things I lay in the midst of, and such was the heel of the deck that I could not stir a limb. Helga shrieked.

I cried out:

'I am not hurt; I'll rise when I can.' Someone was hoarsely bawling from the poop; but whatever the meaning of the yell might have been, it was immediately followed by a loud report resembling the blast of a twenty-four-pounder gun. 'There goes a sail!' I shouted. The vessel found life on being relieved of the canvas, whatever it was; there was a gradual recovery of her hull, and presently she was on a level keel, driving smoothly as a sleigh over a level plain of snow, but with such an infernal bellowing and hooting and ear-piercing whistling of wind accompanying her that there is nothing I can imagine to liken it to.

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