eft us with the fore jury-mast that we'd
rigged up, but not a stitch of canvas. The ship was as naked as a
nigger baby in the Cannibal Islands.

"'We did our best with it, of course, and dug up a stretch of storm
canvas about the size of a leg-o'-mutton sail and lashed that to the
jury foremast and the stump of the bowsprit. With that gale cuttin' off
our ears, it was all the sail she could carry. Bill, we had him lashed
near the tiller we'd rigged up, not havin' a wheel, and by-n-by, most of
us was wishin' we was lashed. But the old hooker stood up under it well,
and though she was buried nearly all the time, her nose came right out
of the green.

"'We'd have done anything in the world to beat north-east, for we knew
the hurricane was goin' to the north-westward, but we couldn't do
anything but run before the wind in our crippled state and the wind was
blowin' north-east. It was shifting northerly and then westerly and we
all knew that we were bein' driven into the very middle of the storm.
The gale grew fiercer and fiercer, the sea was lashed to a mass of foam
and in the shriekin' of the hurricane we couldn't tell, half the time,
whether we were under water or above it.

"'Bill, with his broken head, stayed put at the tiller, the skipper
never went below, Cookie tried to get some grub and the other four of us
were lashed to the pumps. It was rainin' in torrents, too, but that
didn't make any difference, for there was so much water that you
couldn't tell whether it was the waves or the spray or the rain that was
drownin' you; all we knew was that we were gaspin' for breath in an
atmosphere that seemed about half air and half water.

"'Then, quite suddenly, the wind died down, and the rain fell from the
sky as though the sea had been picked up and were bein' tilted over the
ship. The clouds, racin' by and so low that they seemed almost as if you
could reach up and touch them, flew overhead so fast that you couldn't
believe it was a real sky you were lookin' at. It seemed like a painted
piece of metal driving across the sky on an aeroplane. It fairly made me
giddy to watch them. The winds died down, and suddenly became quite
calm.

"'I've seen some seas, too, in my time, but never nothin' like this.
Waves, no matter how high, I've been used to all my life. I've seen seas
over the banks of Newfoundland that would look like a mountain, but
waves like those in the eye of the hurricane I never saw before and I
never ho