For, even during this conversation, both the speakers had occasionally been almost carried from their feet. Nearly every surge swept more or less over the ship. Twice the master had to interpose to save Kate from being prostrated; and still more frequently his services were required in behalf of her aunt. Occupying a position between the two women, he was fortunately able to afford instant aid to either. Meantime, the storm showed no symptoms of subsiding. The rain still fell in sheets, often stinging the bare hands of the victims like hail. The wind shrieked as if the sea had temporarily given up its wicked dead, who gibbered as they rushed past in the gloom. The seas also seemed to run still higher. They came trooping on, fast and thick as hungry wolves; rushed by with a howl that fairly appalled the listeners; or leaped and snarled about the ship, as if eager for their prey, and grudging every moment of delay. Now and then a roller, more colossal than its predecessors, would sweep the whole length of the deck, making a breach completely over the vessel, whose every timber quivered as if she was about to part. The darkness, all this time, was palpable. Often it seemed as if the low sky and the upheaved waves were about to commingle above the doomed ship; and always, in looking seaward, the boundary line between the two was lost in a chaos of obscurity scarcely a hundred feet off. CHAPTER IV. MORNING Environ’d with a wilderness of sea; Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave, Expecting ever when some envious surge Will in his brinish bowels swallow him. —Shakespeare. It is, methinks, a morning full of fate! It riseth slowly, as her sullen car, Had all the weight of sleep and death hung at it! She is not rosy-fingered, but swollen black. —Jonson. “We shall be more sheltered,” continued the captain, “if we change our places. The waves, I see, don’t sweep the deck further aft on the starboard side. Shall we try to get there? I doubt if you could hold out till morning here. Certainly your aunt could not. She is already more dead than alive.” Kate saw, at once, the wisdom of the suggestion. The ship, before going on the bar, had been running nearly parallel to the breakers, her head being slightly inclined seaward; but when the main-topsail went, she had whirled around, and struck bard on, heeling to larboard: consequently she now lay almost at right angles with the surf. Along the inclined deck the waves continually washed. The stern, however, protected the after portion, especially the higher side; for the waters, even when they made a clean breach over the ship, parted right and left around this sheltered spot. “But can we get there?” said Kate, in a whisper, glancing at her aunt, who, through fear and wet, was now almost incapable of moving. “I think I can manage her,” was the reply, in the same low tone, “if you can hold on here till I return.” “We will go, then?”