e
schooner to her bearings, and before she had recovered herself the true
breeze was upon us, with a deep, weird, moaning sound that was
inexpressibly dismal, and that somehow seemed to impart a feeling of
dire foreboding to the listener. Not that there was anything in the
least terrifying in the strength of the wind--far from it, indeed,--for
it was no heavier than a double-reefed topsail breeze, to which the
schooner stood up as stiff as a church, but there was a certain
indescribable hollowness in the sound of it--that is the only fitting
term I can find to apply--that was quite unlike anything that I had
heard before, and that somehow seemed, in its weirdness, to indisputably
forebode disaster.

The schooner was now forging through the water at a speed of some four
knots, and looking well up into the wind, which had come out from the
westward. As I have said, there was already a very heavy swell running,
and upon the top of this a very steep, awkward sea soon began to make,
so that within half an hour of the breeze striking us we were pitching
bows under, and the decks to leeward were all afloat. By this time,
too, it had become perfectly apparent that the wind was rapidly gaining
strength; so rapidly, indeed, that about an hour after the first puff it
came down upon us with all the fury of a squall, laying the schooner
down to her rail, and causing her to plunge with fearful violence into
the fast-rising sea. Within the next half-hour the wind had increased
so greatly in strength that I began to think there really might be
something in Saunders's theory after all, and I was inwardly debating
whether I should haul the fore-sheet to windward and heave the schooner
to, or whether it would be better to up helm and run before it until the
weather should moderate a bit, when a third corposant suddenly appeared,
this time on the boom-foresail gaff-end.

"Now, sir," remarked Saunders, "we shall soon know whether we've got the
worst of the blow yet or not. If we have, that thing'll shift higher
up; but if we haven't, it'll come down like the others."

I did not answer him, for I was at the moment straining my eyes into the
blackness on the weather-bow, where I fancied I had caught, a second or
two before, a deeper shadow. There were moments when I thought I saw it
again, but so profound was the darkness that it really seemed absurd to
suppose it possible to discern anything in it; to make sure, however, I
sang out