At that moment these were the contents of the table: four dinner-plates, four saucers, two plates of bread and biscuit, a large dish of baked potatoes, a platter of corned-beef hash, a pressed tongue, a dish of butter, a glass jar of marmalade, a basin of stewed apples, and innumerable knives, forks, and spoons. All at once there came that peculiar motion that always precedes an unusually heavy roll in a sailing ship. We grasped the long bench with the grip of death. One short roll to windward, and then began the deep, ponderous, resistless lurch to leeward. Over she went, leisurely and quietly, and still farther, till she must have been rail under. At this moment a dusky object shot by us with incredible speed; it was the steward, who vanished backward into the open store-room opposite, and we saw him not again for several minutes. The last part of him to fade out of sight was his ghastly smile disappearing through the doorway. Then various objects began to fetch away in the pantry,--tin cans, cups and saucers, gradually increasing to an _allegro furioso_; and, finally, with a frightful clash, like the climax of a full orchestra, the entire contents of the table swept grandly across to leeward, and fell like an avalanche against the opposite wall. For the moment we were stunned by the appalling crash, and then there smote upon our ears a shriek whose equal cannot be conceived. It swelled now from a low murmur to a perfectly infernal scream, like the screech of a fog siren, and anon sank down again, like the moaning wail of the Irish death-cry. It was the cat. At first we thought that it was buried under the hurricane of dishes, and looked to see it lying in slithers upon the floor. But no; his tail had been nipped in the movable back with which the benches are provided, and the harder we pushed back against it to prevent ourselves from being projected across the table the fiercer was the grip on the tail. We could not release the unhappy animal without unpleasant results, not to say injury, to ourselves, and we could but sit and hearken to its dreadful voice. Solemnly and slowly the ship righted, and a scene of remarkable devastation confronted us. On the table two articles remained, a saucer and a shallow, empty, wooden box, used to chock things off in. Everything else had crashed against the opposite wall with such terrific energy that the plates and dishes were reduced to the minutest fragments. Before it finally found a resting-place the cylindrical roll of tongue had carromed separately on each baked potato; a large, unbroken platter slid back and forth on the floor like a toboggan upon a slick, gleaming path of apple-sauce; the butter was face down in the extreme corner of the store-room; and the elliptical wad of corned-beef hash loomed up brown and moist upon the opposite panel, where it had stuck like a wet snow-ball.