There is something in the very act of holding on tight which increases the natural tenacity of purpose that exists in some minds, and, if I may use a very vulgar figure, thickens the glue. At the end of the two hours, one of the sailors, who had something to do at the stern in a great hurry, ran up to the spot where the only passenger was clinging and nearly tumbled over him. Then, of course, he cursed him, as men in a hurry are wont to, and exclaimed, "Get down below! What the devil are you doing up here, where you are in everybody's way? Get down, I say!" "I will not," was the reply, in a quiet, and even sweet, but very resolute, voice. "Then I'll knock you overboard, by ----!" said the seaman, adding an oath which did not much strengthen the threat in the ears to which it was addressed. "You cannot, and you dare not try," answered the other. But then the voice of the skipper, who had been working hard at the tiller, was heard exclaiming, "Let him alone, Tom;" and he beneficently called down condemnation not only upon the eyes but upon all the members of his subordinate. "Mind your own work, and let him alone." Now, it may be worth while to ask what sort of a personage was this, whom the somewhat irascible Master Tom threatened to knock overboard, and who replied with so little reverence for the threat. He could not be a very formidable person, at least in appearance,--a very necessary qualification of the assertion; for I have known very formidable snakes the most pitiful-looking reptiles I ever beheld; and some of the most dangerous men ever seen, either on the same stage of life where we are playing our parts with them, or on the wider boards of history, have been the least impressive in person, and the meanest-looking of creatures. But, as I was saying,--for it is too late to finish that sentence now,--the single passenger could not be very formidable in appearance; for Tom was probably too wise and too experienced to engage in what he considered even an equal struggle on so dark a night, while the wind was blowing a gale, and the little craft heeling gunwale to. Yet he could not be one without some powers, internally if not externally, which rendered him fully as careless of consequences as the other. Well, he was only a lad of some five feet eight or nine in height, slight-looking in form, and dressed in a common sailor's jacket. But in a leathern belt round his waist was a large caseknife, on the handle or hilt of which, while he continued to hold on to the rail of the bulwark with his left hand, he clasped the fingers of his right in a very resolute and uncompromising manner. We all know that bowie-knives, in one land at least, are very useful companions, and in all lands very formidable weapons. Now, the knife in the lad's black leather belt was not at all unlike a bowie-knife, and not in the least less formidable. There was the slight insinuating curve, the heavy haft, the tremendously