ment; they jostled for the rostrum (a long
nine-pounder swivel); and then speaker after speaker declaimed his
soul's experiences until his voice cracked, while the others sobbed,
exhorted, even leapt in the air. "Stronger, brother!" "'Tis working,
'tis working!" "O deliverance!" "O streams of redemption!" For ten
minutes, or a quarter of an hour maybe, the ship was a Babel, a Bedlam.
And then the tumult would die down as suddenly as it had arisen, and
dismissed by the old man, the crew, with faces once more inscrutable,
but twitching with spent emotion, scattered to their usual tasks.

Five minutes after these singular outbreaks it was difficult to believe
in them. Captain Colenso paced the quarter-deck once more with his
customary shuffle, his hands beneath his coat-tails, his eyes conning
the ship with their usual air of mild abstraction. Now and again he
paused to instruct one of his incapables in the trimming of a brace, or
to correct the tie of a knot. He never scolded; seldom lifted his voice.
By his manner of speech, and the ease of his authority, he and his
family might have belonged to separate ranks of life. Yet I seemed to
detect method in their obedience. The veriest fumbler went about his
work with a concentrated gravity of bearing, as if he fulfilled a
remoter purpose, and understood it while he tied his knots into
"grannies," and generally mismanaged the job in hand.

Towards the middle of our second week out, we fell in with a storm--a
rotatory affair, and soon over by reason that we struck the outer fringe
of it; but to a landsman sufficiently daunting while it lasted. Late in
the afternoon I thrust my head up for a look around. We were weltering
along in horrible forty-foot seas, over which our bulwarks tilted at
times until from the companion hatchway I stared plumb into the grey
sliding chasms, and felt like a fly on the wall. The _Lady Nepean_
hurled her old timbers along under close-reefed maintopsail, and a rag
of a foresail only. The captain had housed topgallant masts and lashed
his guns inboard; yet she rolled so that you would not have trusted a
cat on her storm-washed decks. They were desolate but for the captain
and helmsman on the poop; the helmsman, a mere lad--the one, in fact,
who had pulled the bow-oar to our rescue--lashed and gripping the spokes
pluckily, but with a white face which told that, though his eyes were
strained on the binnacle, his mind ran on the infernal seas astern. Ove