loped in smoke and flame. A burst of fire from her main hatchway
threw a red glare over the turbulent waters, and showed the vessel's
masts and rigging brightly displayed against the dark sky above and
beyond them. The main-sail by this time caught fire, and was blazing
away along the yard fiercely; and the flame soon reached the loftier
sails and running rigging; the fire below was raging between decks,
and rising in successive bursts of flame from the hatchways. The
vessel had been filled with combustible material, and the doomed brig,
in a short space of time, was one mass of flame.

To a spectator beholding the sight in safety, it would have been a
magnificent spectacle--the grandest, the most terrific, perhaps, it is
possible to conceive--a ship on fire at night in the mid-ocean. The
hull of the vessel lay flaming like an immense furnace on the surface
of the deep; her masts, and the lower and topsail-yards, with
fragments of the rigging hanging round them, sparkling, and scattering
the fire-flakes, rose high above it, while huge volumes of smoke ever
and anon obscured the whole, then borne away by the strong breeze,
left the burning brig doubly distinct, placed in strong relief against
the dark vault of heaven behind. The lofty spars, as their fastenings
were burnt through, fell, one by one, into the hissing water, and at
length the tall masts, no longer supported by the rigging, and nearly
burnt into below the deck, fell over, one after the other, into the
deep.

Suddenly Captain Horton started to his feet,

"It is, it is a sail--look, do you now see it coming up in the light
of the brig?"

"It is so, captain," responded his men one after the other.

"Thank God we shall yet be saved! If the pirate had scuttled the ship
we should have had no chance; but his cruel course has saved us, for
the flame has attracted some vessel to our succor."

"Perhaps the pirate returning," remarked Mr. Williams.

"No, that kept on before the wind, and this is coming up. God grant it
be an English vessel, and a swift one, and we may yet save your
daughter!"

This remark struck a chord of hope in the heart of Mr. Williams, and
roused him to his native manliness.

"But," said he, "our own vessel has drifted far from us, and we shall
not be seen by this one."

"I think they will come within hail; they will at least sail round the
burning vessel, in the hopes of picking up somebody. Come, my men,
let's make some kind of sail