Wonderful to relate, there astern of us at daybreak was the redoubtable “Judas Dowes,” with the same canvas set as ourselves. We knew her by her stunsail-boom, and she was apparently gaining on us and was making better weather of it than we were. I never heard the wind so shriek and roar in a ship’s rigging as it did this morning, and it whipped the tops off the seas and sent them flying aboard in storms of whistling spray, which seemed to cut the face like powdered glass. It kept on breezing, too, and at 9.30 the old man ordered another reef tied in the maintop-sail. Thus far the damage from wind or sea was limited to the injury of one man, Louis Jacquin, who was thrown across the forecastle-head against an anchor-fluke with great force, badly lacerating his left leg, and incapacitating him from other work than steering. And still the wind increased, and at half-past eleven the skipper estimated its velocity at fifty-five nautical miles an hour. At noon I started to go on deck to bring down a book which I had left in the wheel-house; and, without stopping to put on oil-skins, I got into a leather jacket and went up out of the companion door. The captain was leaning against the lee side of the wheel-house, and I was about to join him, when he called out, “Hey, don’t you see that sea,--jump!” I looked over my shoulder and beheld a huge hill of water rising higher and higher alongside, in that peculiar, lazy manner of very large waves. Still, trusting to my own judgment, I did not think that it would break aboard, when there was a crash like a broadside of artillery, relieving me of any further suspense, and I was swept completely off my feet (and this on the poop), only saving myself from bringing to against the rail by a lucky clutch of the lazarette hatch-house. Then swash came the water back again, and I was once more half buried in the cold brine; but, watching a chance, the skipper and I shot across to the companion door, opened it, and were assailed with the cry, “The cabin’s flooded,” which rang out above the gale. It was even so. The great sea had stove the forward skylight on the cabin-house, and had deluged the dining-room with hundreds of gallons of salt-water. It is impossible to conceive of such a wreck as we encountered below. The poor little gentle Malay was leaning against the table almost in tears, trying to keep his feet under him, while Sammie was doing noble work with a bucket, baling out the water which was swirling about with the rolling, to a clinking chorus of plates, cruets, thick glass tumblers (as indestructible as granite), knives, forks, and spoons, which had been swept off the table when the water broke full upon it. Ten minutes later our dinner would have been reposing on it; and fancy the calamity in that event! But it is too dreary to contemplate. Indeed, the dinner was delayed nearly an hour, and we had neither soup nor dessert,--the first occasion on which we