you make it?"

"Looks like a ship's mast, with the yard attached, and a man a-holding
on to it and hailing us for help--leastways, that's what it seems to
me!"

"Jerusalem! On the weather-bow, you say? Can we forereach him on this
tack?"

"I reckon we can jist about do it, boss, if you put the helm up a bit
kinder nearer the wind," drawled out the lookout from his post of
observation in the main-top, where he had stopped a moment on catching
sight of the object floating in the water ahead of the vessel, as he
was coming down from aloft after restowing the bunt of the
main-topgallantsail that had blown loose from its lashings.

The _Susan Jane_ of and for Boston, Massachusetts, with a cargo from
London, had been caught at the outset of her passage across the Atlantic
by what her American skipper termed "a pretty considerable gale of
wind;" and she now lay tossing about amid the broken waves of the
boisterous Bay of Biscay, on the morning after the tempest, the full
force of which she had fortunately escaped, trying to make some headway
under her jib, close-reefed topsails, and storm staysails, with a bit of
her mainsail set to steady her, half brailed up--although the task was
difficult, with a nasty chopping cross-sea and an adverse wind.

The vessel had recently passed a lot of wreckage, that betokened they
were not far from the spot where some ship, less lucky than themselves,
had been overwhelmed by the treacherous waters of the ill-fated bay; and
the news that a waif was now in sight, supporting a stray survivor,
affected all hearts on board, and roused their sympathies at once.

The captain of the New England barque had already adjusted the
telescope, that he carried in true sailor fashion tucked under his left
arm, to his "weather-eye," and was looking eagerly in the direction
pointed out by the seaman, before he received the answer from aloft to
his second hail. But he could not as yet see what the lookout had
discovered, from the fact of the waves being still high and his place of
outlook from the deck lower than the other's.

"Are you certain, Tom, you see some one?" he called out again, after a
moment's pause, during which he narrowly scanned the uneven surface of
the sea.

"Yes, sure," was the confident reply. "As sartain as there's snakes in
Virginny!"

"Still in the same direction?"

"Ay, ay; a point or two to windward."

"Ha! I see him at last!" exclaimed the skipper, clambering up from