les in a melancholy voice; but rousing himself a minute afterwards he
added more cheerfully, "Wait till the sea gets down, and then we'll try
to improve our condition. I wonder, though, how these other fellows are
getting on in the chains amidships? Jackson, ahoy!"

"Hullo, sir," came a faint hail in answer, from amid the breaking seas
further on ahead of us, where only a black spot of a head could be seen
occasionally emerging from the mass of encircling foam.

"Are you all right there?" sang out the captain.

"We're alive, sir; but nearly tired out," replied Jackson in a low weak
tone.

"Can't you try, man, to work your way aft and join us," urged Captain
Miles, comprehending how exhausted the young seaman and his companions
there must be. "There's plenty of room here for all of us, and you'll
not be so much worked about by the sea."

"The waves are too strong for us, sir," cried out the other, but his
voice now seeming to have a little more courage in it, for he added
after a bit, "I think we can manage it, though, if you will make fast
the bight of the topsail sheet and heave the end to us. It will serve
us to hold on by as we pass along the bulwarks."

"All right, my hearty," answered Captain Miles, he and a couple of the
sailors beside him doing as Jackson had suggested.

Then, the captain himself, undoing his lashings, seized one of the brief
intervals in which the after part of the hull rose above the sea; when,
standing on his feet, while his legs were held by the two sailors, he
hove the end of the rope towards Jackson, who, clutching hold of it,
secured it to the main-shrouds, whence it was stretched taut to the
mizzen rigging, thus serving as a sort of life-line by which the men
could pass aft.

When this was done, the men with Jackson in the main-chains crept
cautiously along the bulwarks, half in and half out of the water,
clutching on to the topsail sheet hand over hand, soon joined us on the
quarter galley--the young second mate being the last to leave, waiting
until his comrades were in safety.

The passage from the one place to the other was perilous in the extreme;
for, the waves surged up sometimes completely over the poor fellows'
heads, when they had once abandoned their footing and had only the frail
swaying rope to support them against the wash of the water. They were
roughly oscillated to and fro, hove up out of the sea one minute and
lowered down again into it the next.

It was