The piece blazed and thundered, lighting up the fog like a volcanic upheaval with a wild crimson glare as though it was the night itself the powder flashed against. But stunning as the roar was, it was not so deafening but that I, for one, caught an echo stinging back through the thickness on the starboard hand like a slap of tall becalmed topsail against a mast. 'Hear it?' shouted a voice forward. 'We were answered yonder,' I cried, pointing. 'Ship ahoy!' at that instant came in a hoarse but clear, thin, far voice out of the blankness on the port bow. 'Good God, we are hailed!' cried Cliffe. 'Bland, answer. Your lungs have got more carrying power than mine.' 'Hallo!' shouted Bland, going to the side in a spring, and sending his voice in the direction of the hail in a deep, roaring, melancholy note. 'What ship's that?' came back distinct but remote, so wonderful was the hush, so burnished the swell. We made answer, and then roared Bland: 'What ship's that?' 'The "Helen MacGregor" of Hull, twenty months out. What's wrong with you, that you're firing guns?' 'All's right with us,' bawled Bland. 'Any ice about, d'ye know?' 'Not used my eyes since daybreak,' echoed the far, thin, hoarse voice. It was strange to hear it, to look into the thickness and see nothing, to know that a ship was there, and listen to a man talking on her! But conversation all that way off was not to be kept up long. After remaining twenty minutes on deck I felt the cold so severely that I returned to the cabin. After I had been below about half an hour the brig heeled sharply on a slant of swell without recovery as before, whence I guessed it had come on to blow suddenly. In fact, I might have known it by the noise of feet overhead and the gushing and hissing of water in motion, shouldered off in foam. I wrapped myself up and went on deck and found the brig lying down close hauled under the canvas she had been brought-to with early in the morning--a reefed maintopsail and foresail; she was looking up for a tall, black, full-rigged ship that was lying with her topsail to the mast on the weather bow as though waiting for us.