-miles pull to windward when he might just as well
make a couple of short boards and heave to within a cable's length of
us?"

By this time I had scrambled to my feet, and was with half a dozen
others watching with mingled curiosity and apprehension the movements of
the stranger, which were certainly not such as I should have expected
her to make had her object in heaving to been _our_ rescue. A boat had
certainly been lowered, but we had not as yet caught a glimpse of it,
from the exasperating circumstance that whenever we rose upon a sea the
boat happened to be sunk in a hollow. At length, however, we got a
moment's view of her, and not only of her but also of something else
which looked remarkably like another raft or a piece of wreckage, and it
was toward this that the boat was steering and _not_ toward us.

"By heaven!" I exclaimed, "they have _not_ seen us after all; they are
not coming here, and unless we can make them hear us within the next ten
minutes our chance will be lost. It is a piece of wreckage--possibly
part of the poor old _Dolphin_--that they have stopped to examine. We
must shout, lads, and with a will, the ship is to leeward of us and
_may_ catch the sound. Now then, when we rise stand by--one, two,
three, _Ship ahoy_!"

We shouted as we had probably never shouted before, not once but at
least fifty times; we shouted ourselves hoarse, and at last had the
vexation to see the boat being again hoisted up. We now fully expected
to see the ship immediately bear up on her course, but she did not; her
topsail remained aback for nearly ten minutes longer, during which we
continued to shout and wave for our very lives. At length, however, the
ponderous main-yard swung, the square canvas was braced sharp up, and
the ship gathered way. A breathless half minute passed, during which
every eye among us was unwaveringly fixed upon the distant ship, except
when she vanished behind a wave-crest, and then a joyous shout went up.

"_Now_ she sees us! she is standing this way, hurrah! hurrah!" And in
the midst of it all the boom of a gun came sullenly up against the wind
from the stranger, as an assurance of help and rescue.

Oh, how anxiously we watched the noble fabric as she ponderously
ploughed her way obliquely toward us over the liquid ridges, now
plunging to her hawse-holes and rolling heavily to leeward as she dived
into the trough, and anon raising her dripping bows, richly carved and
gilt, hig