rong.

So we lay for nearly an hour, our only movement being with the outgoing
tide, the sails flapping with the slow swell of the sea. But when the
sun had disappeared the wind commenced to come, first in little puffs,
now from one quarter and then from another. The gale would be on us in
a moment.

The Captain took the helm then, and ordered us to stand by and be ready
to tend the sails.

"Look out, too, for the swinging of that boom," he said, "and make Ugly
get out of the way and lie down somewhere."

Ugly, hearing that speech, did not wait for further commands, but stowed
himself away at the foot of the mast.

Now the wind came in heavier puffs, and then in squalls from the east.

"I hope it will settle there," spoke out the Captain. "It is coming
heavier, but I hope steady."

He kept his eyes on all parts of the now lowering sky, and presently
added--

"Take two reefs in the mainsail and shift the jib! Get the storm-jib
up. Now hook on. Run it out. Hoist away."

That was done, no easy matter for novices in a heavy sea, and we flew
away before the increasing gale. Fortunately the night was not very
dark, there being a quarter moon to throw its light through the rifts of
clouds.

How fast the sea got up! The wind grew heavier every moment. The mast
of our little cutter creaked with each plunge, and the plunges were hard
and quick. The scene was truly alarming, and we felt the danger of our
situation. To be sure, we were comparatively safe if the gale should
grow no worse; but it was increasing every moment in a manner that
threatened in another hour to be too much for us. There was danger,
too, that something might be carried away, or that, in the frothy sea
and uncertain light, we might strike some of the sunken rocks that now
and then stood off from shore like sentries. But the _Youth_ leapt
furiously onward from one mad wave to another, our good Captain steering
with a strong hand.

The black, broken clouds rolled close to the sea, which seemed striving
madly to swallow them; but on they flew with the screams of the wind.
The thin moonlight, streaming unsteadily through the troops of clouds
across the riven waves, had a ghastly effect--sometimes obscuring,
sometimes exaggerating the terrors surrounding us. The shore, a mile to
leeward, was to our sight only a bristling, indefinite terror; for
there, where loomed the land we longed for, was the greatest peril--the
line of fierce break