il had already done its work before the hurricane proper
had struck us, in that it had imparted some life, even though ever so
little, to the schooner; she was already paying slowly off when the
first stroke of the hurricane beat her down, and she continued to do so
until, as she got dead before it, she rose suddenly to an even keel and
went scudding away to leeward like a frightened sea-bird. The awful
volume of sound given out by the fierce, headlong swoop of the wind as
it bore down upon us quite prepared me to see both masts blown clean out
of the schooner; but all her gear fortunately happened to be sound and
good, and the loss of the foresail was the full extent of the damage
sustained by us.

Having satisfied myself upon that point, I ventured to raise my head a
little above the bulwarks to see how the strange sail was faring.
Pierrepoint had reported her as being visible in the north-eastern
quarter, and if this were so she ought now to be somewhere astern of us,
since we were running off about south-west; and, sure enough, there she
was, about a point and a half on our starboard quarter, just visible in
the midst of the ghostly glare of the phosphorescent foam. She was,
like ourselves, running dead before the gale, and I thought I could make
out that her topsails had withstood the tremendous strain of the
outburst and were still doing their duty. If this were so, since we
were scudding under bare poles, she would soon overtake and pass us
quite as closely as would be at all consistent with the safety of the
two craft, and we should be afforded an opportunity to learn something
of her character, and to judge whether she was the barque that we had
been so industriously seeking. I made my way over to Ryan, who was
standing--as well as he could against the violence of the wind that
threatened to sweep him off his feet--close to the helmsman, pointed
toward the stranger, and, clinging to the companion, we stood and
watched her for a minute or two, half suffocated with the difficulty of
breathing in so furious a tempest. She was now about four miles from
us, and it soon became apparent that she was overhauling us fast,
although by no means so fast as I expected; and she was so nearly end-on
to us that I suggested to Ryan the advisability of our showing a light,
as it looked very much as though she had not yet seen us and might
approach us so closely as to put both craft in imminent peril.

"All in good time," s