order
to keep the raft's head pointed in the required direction.

Suddenly, a greenish spectral radiance beamed down upon him from above;
and, quickly casting a startled glance aloft, Blyth shudderingly beheld
a ball of lambent greenish light quivering upon the upper extremity of
the long tapering yard and swaying to and fro with the roll of the raft,
much as the flame of a candle would have done under similar
circumstances. Clinging lightly to the end of the yard, it alternately
elongated and flattened as the spar swayed to and fro, now and then
rolling a few inches down the yard as though about to travel down to the
deck, but as often returning to the extremity of the yard again.
Presently another and similar luminous ball gleamed into shape at the
mast-head, swaying and wavering about the end of the spar like its
companion. They were _corposants_, and whilst they conveyed to the
skipper the only additional warning needed of the impending elemental
strife, they also at once explained the mystery of the lights to leeward
for which he was steering. They also were undoubtedly corposants
glimmering from the spars of the strange sail of which he was in
pursuit, and which, from her present proximity, must have been steering
to the eastward, and consequently toward him, instead of to the westward
and away from him, as he had feared.

Blyth believed she certainly could not be more than a mile distant, his
conviction being that the feeble, sickly lights of the ghostly
corposants could not penetrate further than that distance in so thick an
atmosphere, and it now became of the utmost importance--nay, it might
even be a matter of life or death for him--to reach the stranger before
the hurricane should burst upon them. He looked over the side to
ascertain the speed of the raft through the water, and his heart quailed
as he observed that, save for an occasional tiny phosphorescent spark on
the surface or a faintly luminous halo lower down in the black depths
slowly drifting by, there was nothing to indicate that she had any
motion whatever. Her speed was not more than half a knot per hour; and
the stranger was probably a mile distant--two hours away at the raft's
then rate of progress! Something must be done, and quickly, too; for
out of the darkness round about him there now floated weird, whispering
sighs, faint, dismal moanings, and now and then a sudden momentary rush
as of invisible wings, telling that the storm-fiend