e morning
itself began, by taking his stand at the helm, in his capacity of
skipper of the Betsey. With the prospect of the services of the Sabbath
before him, and after working all Saturday to boot, it was rather hard
to set him down to a midnight spell at the helm, but he could not be
wanted at such a time, as we had no other such helmsman aboard. The
gale, thickened with rain, came down, shrieking like a maniac, from off
the peaked hills of Rum, striking away the tops of the long ridgy
billows that had risen in the calm to indicate its approach, and then
carrying them in sheets of spray aslant the furrowed surface, like
snow-drift hurried across a frozen field. But the Betsey, with her
storm-jib set, and her mainsail reefed to the cross, kept her weather
bow bravely to the blast, and gained on it with every tack. She had been
the pleasure yacht, in her day, of a man of fortune, who had used, in
running south with her at times as far as Lisbon, to encounter, on not
worse terms than the stateliest of her neighbors in the voyage, the
swell of the Bay of Biscay; and she still kept true to her old
character, with but this drawback, that she had now got somewhat crazy
in her fastenings, and made rather more water in a heavy sea than her
one little pump could conveniently keep under. As the fitful gust struck
her headlong, as if it had been some invisible missile hurled at us from
off the hill-tops, she stooped her head lower and lower, like old
stately Hardyknute under the blow of the "King of Norse," till at length
the lee chain-plate rustled sharp through the foam; but, like a staunch
Free Churchwoman, the lowlier she bent, the more steadfastly did she
hold her head to the storm. The strength of the opposition served but to
speed her on all the more surely to the desired haven. At five o'clock
in the morning we cast anchor in Loch Scresort,--the only harbor of Rum
in which a vessel can moor,--within two hundred yards of the shore,
having, with the exception of the minister, gained no loss in the gale.
He, luckless man, had parted from his excellent _sou-wester_; a sudden
gust had seized it by the flap, and hurried it away far to the lee. He
had yielded it to the winds, as he had done the temporalities, but much
more unwillingly, and less as a free agent. Should any conscientious
mariner pick up any where in the Atlantic a serviceable ochre-colored
_sou-wester_, not at all the worse for the wear, I give him to wit that
he