s! look at that!"

And as he stood there gazing he saw that vast column of water sweep
steadily down upon and over the barque, completely hiding her from view
for a moment. Then it suddenly wavered in the middle and broke,
collapsing with a tremendous splash and commotion of the sea, the sound
of which came drifting down to the brig with startling distinctness some
ten or twelve seconds later. And there, in the very midst of the
tumbling circle of foaming whiteness left by the vanished waterspout
there floated the barque, no longer trim and all ataunto as she had
shown a few seconds before, but a dismasted, mangled wreck, with
bulwarks gone, boats swept from her davits, all three masts snapped
short off at the level of the deck and lying alongside with all
attached, a mere tangled mass of wreckage still fast to the hull by the
standing and running rigging.

Leslie stamped his foot upon the deck in sympathetic vexation at the
ruin thus wrought in a moment, and again applied his eye to the
telescope. The carpenter, whose watch on deck it now was, stood beside
him, eagerly impatient to discuss with him the details of the
catastrophe that they had just witnessed; while the watch, forward,
leaned over the bows alternately muttering to each other their opinions,
and glancing round in apprehension lest a waterspout should steal upon
the brig unawares and treat them as the crew of the barque had been
treated.

It was this same crew--or rather the entire absence of any sign of
them--that was now disturbing Leslie.

"I can see nothing of them," he muttered impatiently, searching the
wreck with the lenses of his telescope. "Here, Chips, take a squint,
man," he continued, thrusting the instrument into the eager hands of the
carpenter. "His decks are as bare as the back of my hand; there is not
enough bulwark left standing to make a matchbox out of--nothing but the
stumps of a few staunchions here and there. I can see the coamings of
the hatches rising above the level of the planking; I can see the
windlass; I can just make out the short stumps of the three masts, and I
can find where the poop skylight stood; but hang me if I can see
anything _living_ aboard her!"

The carpenter in turn applied his eye to the telescope, and gazed
through it long and anxiously.

"No, sir," he agreed at length, "what you says is perfekly true; there
ain't nobody a-movin' about on that there vessel's decks. Question is,
what's become of