gurling of waves; and,
to crown all, a feeling of deadly sickness. When he first opened his
eyes, he could not conceive where he was, or what was the meaning of the
furious motion that he felt, and of the tremendous sounds that he heard.
A few minutes' cogitation with himself, however, solved the mystery, and
exposed to him his true position. In great alarm--for he thought the
vessel was on the eve of going down--Johnny Armstrong rolled himself out
of his bed, and crawled in his shirt up the cabin ladder. On gaining the
summit, he found himself confronted by the captain, who, with a very
serious face, was standing by the helm.

"Are--are--are--we--near--Mon--trose, captain?" inquired Johnny, in a
voice rendered so feeble by sickness and terror, that it was impossible
to hear him a yard off, amidst the roaring of the winds and waves; for
we suppose we need not more explicitly state, that he was in the midst
of a storm, and as pretty a one it was as the most devoted admirer of
the picturesque could desire to see.

"What?" roared the captain, in a voice of thunder, at the same time
stooping down to catch his feeble interrogatory. Johnny repeated it;
but, ere he could obtain an answer, a raking wave, which came in at the
stern, took him full on the breast as he stood on the companion ladder,
with his bust just above the level of the deck, sent him down, heels
over head, into the cabin, and, in a twinkling, buried him in a foot and
a half of water on the floor, where he lay for some time at full length,
sprawling and floundering amidst the wreck which the sudden and violent
influx of water had occasioned. On recovering from the stunning effects
of his descent--for he had, amongst other small matters, received a
violent contusion on the head--Johnny for an instant imagined that he
had somehow or other got to the bottom of the sea. Finding, however, at
length, that this was not precisely the case, he arose, though dripping
with wet, yet not very like a sea god, and having denuded himself of his
only garment, his shirt, crawled into his bed, where he now determined
to await quietly and patiently the fate that might be intended for him;
and this fate, he had no doubt, was suffocation by drowning.

"Very extraordinar this," said Johnny Armstrong to himself, as he lay
musing in bed on the perilous situation into which he had so simply and
innocently got--"very extraordinar, that I couldna get the length o'
Brechin without a' th