“How long was the squall coming up?” said I, as soon as the roar of the elements suffered me to speak, for it was only in the occasional pauses in the gale, that I could hope to be heard. “It came up like a pet in a woman—one moment her face is all smiles, the next black as a thunder cloud. When five bells struck the sky was as clear as a kitten’s eye, and now you can’t see a fathom over the starboard bow; while we are driving along here like a chip in a mill-race, or a land-bird caught by a nor’wester. Whistle, whistle—howl, howl, why it blows as if the devil himself was working the bellows up to windward.” I could not help smiling at my messmate’s energy, and as he closed I looked thoughtlessly over the starboard quarter, when a wild dash of sleet right in my face, stinging as if ten thousand nettles had struck me, forced me to turn my back on the storm more rapidly than I had faced it. “It is as sharp as a razor,” I ejaculated, when I recovered my breath, “and cuts to the bone. But let me see, Mr. Merrivale,” said I, approaching the binnacle, “this squall must be from the northeast. Aye! not a point either way. It’s a lucky thing we have a good offing; I wouldn’t be on the coast now for a year’s pay.” “It would be an ugly berth,” said Merrivale, shaking the sleet from his hair, “I’ve no notion of being jammed up like a rat in a corner, with a lee-shore on one side, and a wind blowing great guns on the other, while one’s only chance is to hug the gale under a crowd of canvass that threatens to snap your masts off as I could snap a pipe-stem. No! thank God, we’re far at sea!” The words had scarcely left his mouth, and I was as yet unable to answer, when a strange, booming sound, over the larboard bow, smote on my ear, thrilling through every nerve; while, at the same instant, the look-out shouted, in sharp, quick tones, “Breakers ahead!” For an instant there was an ominous silence, while even the tempest seemed to die momently away. No one who has not heard that fearful cry on a lee shore, when surrounded by darkness, can have any notion of our feelings. Each man held his breath, and turned his ear anxiously to leeward. In that awful second what varied emotions rushed through our minds, as we heard, rising distinctly over the partial lull of the tempest, the hoarse roar of the surf, apparently close under our lee. “Port—a-port—jam her close to the wind,” almost shrieked Merrivale, the energy of his character, in the moment of peril, divesting him of his usual prolixity.