The Captain’s precautions were not taken too soon. The topsails were hardly close reefed, all the canvas not absolutely required to steer the brigantine had been hardly taken in, ere the sky was darkened as if the moon had been suddenly snuffed out, and the squall was upon them. ‘The Bashful Maid’ lay over, gunwale under, driving fiercely through the seething water, which had not yet risen to the heavy sea that was too surely coming. She plunged, she dived, she strained, she quivered like some living thing striving earnestly and patiently for its life. The rain hissed down in sheets, the lightning lit up the slippery deck, the dripping pale-faced men, the bending spars, the straining tackle, and the few feet of canvas that must be carried at any price. In the quick-succeeding flashes every man on board could see that the others did their duty. From the Captain, holding on by one hand, composed and cheerful, with his speaking-trumpet in the other, to the ship’s boy, with his little bare feet and curling yellow hair, there was not a skulker amongst them! They remembered it long afterwards with honest pride, and ‘The Bashful Maid’ behaved beautifully! Yes, in defiance of the tempestuous squall, blowing as it seemed from all points of the compass at once; in defiance of crackling lightning, and thunder crashing overhead ere it rolled away all round the horizon, reverberating over the ocean for miles; in defiance of black darkness and lurid gleams, and drenching rain, and the cruel raging sea rising every moment and running like a mill-race, Captain and crew were alike confident they would weather it. And they did. But it was a sadly worn, and strained, and shattered craft that lay upon the fast subsiding water, some six hours after the squall, under the glowing sun of a morning in the tropics; a sun that glinted on the sea till its heaving surface looked all one sheet of burnished gold; a sun that was truly comforting to the drenched and wearied crew, although its glare exposed pitilessly the whole amount of damage the brigantine had sustained. That poor ‘Bashful Maid’ was as different now from the trim yacht-like craft that sailed past the Needles, gaudy with paint and gleaming with varnish, as is the dead seabird, lying helpless and draggled on the wave, from the same creature soaring white and beautiful, in all its pride of power and plumage, against the summer sky.