my chest, that he knocked all the breath out of my lungs, and broke my
second sentence into pieces.

"Where's the powder?" again asked he, his voice ascending in the scale
of articulation.

"How am I to know?" fulminated the one, angrily, loading his gun with
the despatch of an adroit musketeer. "Am I a magazine?"

"No; I know that," said the other, tartly.

"Well; what's the good of baiting a fellow when he's busy," replied the
first decisively.

I could rest no longer in ignorance of my fate, and I scrambled on deck.
The vessel labouring very much in a heavy sea, had not a stitch of
canvass on her, and her bare mast tapered into the air like a cocoa-nut
tree that had been discrowned.

"What is all this?" I said, appealing to one man who had hold of the
tiller, and, with his neck extended like a race-horse, seemed to be
steering as if the greatest way was on the vessel.

"Look there, your Honour," and without removing his eyes from the bow of
the cutter, he pointed the thumb of his left hand over his shoulder. I
turned, and saw, half a mile astern, the cause of all this uproar. But I
had barely a clear conception of what I was looking at, when my
companions with loaded guns reappeared on deck. The triggers clicked,
and I assumed their guns were to be discharged at once, but D---- called
out,

"Not yet; it's too far off."

"Tell us when to fire, then," said my two friends, filing themselves in
that attitude which the reader may have observed in a regiment of
soldiers, when the word is given to "present."

"What!" I cried out, now that I found my senses by the visual
elucidation of the threatened evil;

"What! you don't mean to say you are going to fire with a couple of
fowling pieces at a water-spout?"

"To be sure, Sir," answered D----, giving me a momentary glance that he
ventured to take, clandestinely, from the water-spout. "Don't they fire
guns to break them?"

"Yes," I replied, "people do,--cannon!"

However, I could not get any one to agree with me, that a rifle-ball
would have just as much effect on the dispersion of the huge water-spout
that boiled and waved, like an elastic tower, to and fro with the wind,
and roared in the wake of the yacht, as a sigh would arrest the rotation
of Sirius; and so, placing my life in the custody of Providence, I went
back to my book, and left my companions standing on the poop with guns
presented, and the whole crew with leaping hearts and open mouths
waiting