urrah, men! rig out the topmast studding sail boom!
Lay aloft, and I'll send the rigging up to you!" We sprang aloft into the
top; lowered a girtline down, by which we hauled up the rigging; rove the
tacks and halyards; ran out the boom and lashed it fast, and sent down the
lower halyards as a preventer. It was a clear starlight night, cold and
blowing; but everybody worked with a will. Some, indeed, looked as though
they thought the "old man" was mad, but no one said a word.

We had had a new topmast studding sail made with a reef in it,--a thing
hardly ever heard of, and which the sailors had ridiculed a good deal,
saying that when it was time to reef a studding sail it was time to take
it in. But we found a use for it now; for, there being a reef in the
topsail, the studding sail could not be set without one in it also. To be
sure, a studding sail with reefed topsails was rather a novelty; yet there
was some reason in it, for if we carried that away, we should lose only a
sail and a boom; but a whole topsail might have carried away the mast and
all.

While we were aloft, the sail had been got out, bent to the yard, reefed,
and ready for hoisting. Waiting for a good opportunity, the halyards were
manned and the yard hoisted fairly up to the block; but when the mate came
to shake the cat's-paw out of the downhaul, and we began to boom end the
sail, it shook the ship to her center. The boom buckled up and bent like a
whipstick, and we looked every moment to see something go; but, being of
the short, tough upland spruce, it bent like whalebone, and nothing could
break it. The carpenter said it was the best stick he had ever seen.

The strength of all hands soon brought the tack to the boom end, and the
sheet was trimmed down, and the preventer and the weather brace hauled
taut to take off the strain. Every rope-yarn seemed stretched to the
utmost, and every thread of canvas; and with this sail added to her, the
ship sprang through the water like a thing possessed. The sail being
nearly all forward, it lifted her out of the water, and she seemed
actually to jump from sea to sea. From the time her keel was laid, she had
never been so driven; and had it been life or death with everyone of us,
she could not have borne another stitch of canvas.

Finding that she would bear the sail, the hands we're sent below, and our
watch remained on deck. Two men at the wheel had as much as they could do
to keep her within three points o