eel upwards. And as she did so, a
hideous shriek rang out from her interior and became audible even above
the awful rush of the gale.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO.

AN ABDUCTION AND AN IMPORTANT CAPTURE.

For a few moments I felt bewildered--stunned--by the awful suddenness of
this frightful catastrophe; the piercing shrieks of despair, too, which
continued to issue from the interior of the vessel, unmanned me, and I
crouched there upon the upturned bottom of the fabric like one in a
dream. I felt that it _was_ a dream; the disaster was too complete and
too unexpected to be real, and I waited there, frozen with horror,
anxiously looking for the moment when I should awake and be released
from the dreadful nightmare.

But the sight of some half-a-dozen men battling for their lives in the
water to leeward of the hull, and vainly struggling to reach the main-
topgallant-mast--which had gone at the first stroke of the hurricane,
and having somehow broken adrift from the topmast-head, now lay
floating, with all attached, a few yards away--brought my senses back to
me, and abandoning my precarious refuge I sprang into the sea and
assisted the men, one after the other, to reach the floating spars. As
I looked round me, in the vain hope of discovering further survivors, a
few more spars floated up to the surface--a spare topmast, a studding-
sail boom or two, the fore-topgallant-mast, with royal-mast, yards, and
sails attached; and finally a hen-coop with seven or eight drowned fowls
in it. All these I at once took measures to secure, knowing that our
only hope of ultimate escape--and a very frail and slender hope it then
appeared--rested upon the possibility of our being able to construct a
raft with them. In this attempt we were fortunately successful, and
sunset found us established on a small but fairly substantial and well-
constructed raft. We mustered seven hands all told, six seamen and
myself--_seven only out of our entire crew_! And so far we were safe.
But as I looked, first at the frail structure which supported us, and
then at the boundless waste of angry sea by which we were environed, and
upon which we were helplessly tossed to and fro, I thought in my haste
that it would have been better after all if we had shared the fate of
our comrades, now at rest in their ocean grave and beyond the reach of
those sufferings which seemed only too surely to await us. Then better
thoughts came to me. I reflected that wh