locks and
sheets as the wind caught it on the other quarter, making the long
switch of a mast to spring like a bow, while the weather-shrouds slacked
up for a moment in bights, and then came back taut with a twang you
might have heard a mile! We could now see, as the space opened behind
the rock, another frightful jagged ledge, on which the rollers were
heaving in liquid masses high up a precipitous rock, and where the
channel was not a cable's length wide, leading into a foaming gloomy
inlet, where not even the beams of the moon could penetrate! I heard the
captain say, in his old decided way,

"'Now for it, Cleveland! You take the battery, and I'll look out for the
ship!'

"Then, gentlemen," said Hardy, with unusual animation, as he waved his
right arm aloft with an imaginary cutlass swinging over his head, "came
the word 'Fire!'

"Yes, the entire starboard broadside, round shot, grape, and canister,
all pointed toward a centre, were delivered with one simultaneous
shock--the hurricane a mere cat's-paw in comparison--which shook the
corvette as if she had struck a rock, while the smoke and sheets of
flame spouted out from the cannon, half hiding the black torrent which
gushed forth from so many hoarse throats; and as the roar of the
concussion was taken up in terrible echoes from the lion on the rock, a
peppering volley of musket-balls from the marines on the poop and
forecastle made a barking tenor to the music.

"Meanwhile the helm of the 'Scourge' was hove hard down, and as she just
swirled, by a miracle, clear of the ledge under our lee, and came up to
the wind with the sails slamming and banging hard enough to send the
canvas out of the bolt-ropes, the courses were clewed up, every thing
aloft came down by the run; anchor after anchor went plunging to the
bottom, and before the cables had fairly begun to fly out of the
hawse-holes with their infernal jar and rattle, high above the sounds of
flapping sails, snapping blocks, running chains, and what not, came
another clear order, 'Fire!'

"Then pealed out the port broadside at a helpless, dismasted hulk within
two hundred yards of our beam, rolling like a worm-eaten log on the top
of a ruffled broad roller, going to break, in ten seconds, on the ledge,
whose pointed rocks stood up like black toothed fangs to grind its prey
to atoms! But before the fangs closed upon it our own teeth gave it a
shake; and as the breath of our bull-dogs was swept aft by the fresh