There was but little of her face to be seen. She was wearing an indiarubber cap shaped like a sou'-wester, the brim of which came low, while the flannel ear-flaps almost smothered her cheeks. I could now see, however, that her eyes were of a dark blue, with a spirit of life and even of vivacity in them that expressed a wonderful triumph of heart over the languor of frame indicated by the droop of the eyelids. A little of her short hair of pale gold showed under the hinder thatch of the sou'-wester; her face was blanched. But I could not look at the pretty mouth, the pearl-like teeth, the soft blue eyes, the delicately figured nostril, without guessing that in the hour of bloom this girl would show as bonnily as the fairest lass of cream and roses that ever hailed from Denmark. We stepped on to the deck--into the thunder of the gale and the flying clouds of spray. I still wore my oilskins, and was as dry in them as at the hour of leaving home. I felt the comfort, I assure you, of my high sea-boots as I stood upon that deck, holding on a minute to the house-front, with the water coming in a little rage of froth to my legs and washing to leeward with the _scend_ of the barque with the force of a river overflowing a dam. Our first glance was aloft. The foretopgallant-mast was broken off at the head of the topmast and hung with its two yards supported by its gear, but giving a strange wrecked look to the whole of the fabric up there as it swung to the headlong movements of the hull, making the spars, down to the solid foot of the foremast, tremble with the spearing blows it dealt. The jibbooms were also gone, and this, no doubt, had happened through the carrying away of the topgallant-mast; otherwise all was right up above, assuming, to be sure, that nothing was sprung. But the wild, soaked, desolate--the almost mutilated--look, indeed, of the barque! How am I to communicate the impression produced by the soaked dark lines of sailcloth rolled upon the yards, the ends of rope blowing out like the pennant of a man-of-war, the arched and gleaming gear, the decks dusky with incessant drenchings and emitting sullen flashes as the dark flood upon them rolled from side to side! The running rigging lay all about, working like serpents in the wash of the water; from time to time a sea would strike the bow and burst on high in steam-like volumes which glanced ghastly against the leaden sky that overhung us in strata of scowling vapour, dark as thunder in places, yet seemingly motionless. A furious Atlantic sea was running; it came along in hills of frothing green which shaped themselves out of a near horizon thick with storms of spume. But there was the regularity of the unfathomed ocean in the run of the surge, mountainous as it was; and the barque, with her lashed helm, not a rag showing save a tatter or two of the fore-topmast-staysail whose head we had exposed on the previous night, soared and sank, with her port bow to the sea, with the regularity of