All at once, and in a manner to drive the breath out of one’s body with the suddenness and astonishment of it, the yacht’s bows rose to a huge roller that came rushing at her from right ahead. Up she soared till I dare say she showed twenty foot of her keel forward out of water. The vast liquid mass swept past the sides with a roar that drowned the cannonading of the heavens. Down flashed the vessel’s bows whilst her stern stood up as though she were making her last plunge. I grasped Laura by the waist, clipping hold of a backstay just in time to save us both from being dashed on the deck. Finn staggered and was thrown. Out of the obscurity in the fore part of the schooner rose a wild, hoarse cry of dismay and confusion mingled with the din of crockery tumbling and breaking below, and the grinding sound of movable objects sliding from their places. Heaven and earth, what is it? Another! Not so mountainous this time, but a terribly heavy roller nevertheless. Up rose the yacht again to it, then down fell her stem with a boiling of white waters about her bow, amid the seething of which and the thunder of the liquid volume rushing from off our counter you heard a second cry, or rather groan of amazement and alarm, from the sailors forward, with more distracting noises below. I continued to grip Laura and to hold firmly to the backstay with my wits almost scattered by the incredible violence of the yacht’s soaring and plunging, and by the utter unexpectedness of the swift, brief, headlong dance. But now the yacht floated on a level keel again and continued so to float, the calm being as dead as ever it had been in the most stagnant hour of the day, saving always the southerly undulation which the two gigantic rollers had temporarily flattened out, though the heaving presently began again. I saw Finn rubbing his nose like a dazed man as he stood staring towards the lightning. ‘What could it have been?’ cried Laura. ‘Two volcanic seas, mum,’ answered the fellow who grasped the wheel; ‘there’s most times three. Capt’n, beg pardon, sir, but that’ll ha’ been a mighty bust up yonder to have raised a weight of rollers to be felt as them two was all this distance away.’ ‘The most surprising thing that ever happened to me, Mr. Monson,’ cried Finn, still bewildered. A great drop of rain--a _drop_ do I call it? it seemed as big as a hen’s egg--splashed upon my face, and at the same moment a flash of lightning swept an effulgence as of noontide into heaven and ocean, followed rapidly by an ear-splitting burst of thunder. ‘Finn’s little shower is beginning,’ said I, grasping Laura’s hand; ‘let us take shelter. Anyway the wet should cool the atmosphere if no wind follows. Bless me! how disgusting if it’s to prove merely a thunderstorm.’