efore the terrible west wind. Hour by hour
through the short and gloomy day, sail after sail has gone fluttering
in; till now, at night-fall, she reels and rolls before the storm under
a single close reefed maintopsail.

There is a humming, and a roaring, and a rushing of great waters, so
that they who are clinging to the bulwarks, and watching awe-struck
this great work of the Lord's, cannot hear one another though they
shout. Now there is a grey mountain which chases the ship, overtakes
her, pours cataracts of water over her rounded stern, and goes hissing
and booming past her. And now a roll more frantic than usual, nigh dips
her mainyard, and sends the water spouting wildly over her bulwarks.

("Oh, you very miserable ass," said Captain Brentwood; "to sit down and
try to describe the indescribable. Do you think that because you can
see all the scene before you now, because your flesh creeps, and your
blood moves as you call it to mind, do you think, I say, that you can
describe it? Do you think that you can give a man, in black and white,
with ink, and on paper, any real notion of that most tremendous
spectacle, a sharp bowed ship running before a gale of wind through the
ice in the great South Sea, where every wave rolls round the world? Go
to--read Tom Cringle, who has given up his whole soul to descriptions,
and see how many pictures dwell in your mind's eye, after reading his
books. Two, or at most three, and they, probably, quite different from
what he intended you to see, lovely as they are;--leave describing
things, man, and give us some more facts."

Said Major Buckley, "Go on, Hamlyn, and do the best you can. Don't mind
him." And so I go on accordingly.)

61 degrees 30 minutes South. The Horn, storm-beaten, desolate, four
hundred miles to the North, and barely forty miles to the South, that
cruel, gleaming, ice barrier, which we saw to-day when the weather
lifted at noon, and which we know is there yet, though we dare not
think about it. There comes to us, though, in spite of ourselves, a
vision of what may happen any hour. A wild cry from the foretop. A
mass, grey, indistinct, horrible, rising from the wild waters, scarce a
hundred yards from her bowsprit. A mad hurrying to and fro. A crash. A
great ruin of masts and spars, and then utter, hopeless destruction.
That is the way the poor old Madagascar must have gone. The Lord send
us safe through the ice.

Stunned, drenched to the skin, half-frightened