The spray spits angrily against the canvas; the waves crash against the weather-bow like mountains, the wind howls through the rigging; or, as a gasket gives way, the sail bellying to leeward, splits like the crack of a musket. I hear the captain in the lulls, screaming out orders; and the mate in the rigging, screaming them over, until the lightning comes, and the thunder, deadening their voices, as if they were chirping sparrows. In one of the flashes I see a hand upon the yard-arm lose his foothold, as the ship gives a plunge, but his arms are clinched around the spar. Before I can see any more, the blackness comes, and the thunder, with a crash that half-deafens me. I think I hear a low cry, as the mutterings die away in the distance; and the next flash of lightning, which comes in an instant, I see upon the top of one of the waves alongside, the poor reefer who has fallen. The lightning glares upon his face. But he has caught at a loose bit of running rigging as he fell, and I see it slipping off the coil upon the deck. I shout madly—man overboard!—and—catch the rope, when I can see nothing again. The sea is too high, and the man too heavy for me. I shout, and shout, and shout, and feel the perspiration starting in great beads from my forehead as the line slips through my fingers. Presently the captain feels his way aft, and takes hold with me; and the cook comes, as the coil is nearly spent, and we pull together upon him. It is desperate work for the sailor, for the ship is drifting at a prodigious rate, but he clings like a dying man. By and by at a flash, we see him on a crest, two oars’ length away from the vessel. “Hold on, my man!” shouts the captain. “For God’s sake, be quick!” says the poor fellow; and he goes down in a trough of the sea. We pull the harder, and the captain keeps calling to him to keep up courage, and hold strong. But in the hush we hear him say—“I can’t hold out much longer—I’m most gone!” Presently we have brought the man where we can lay hold of him, and are only waiting for a good lift of the sea to bring him up, when the poor fellow groans out—“It’s of no use—I can’t—good-by!” And a wave tosses the end of the rope, clean upon the bulwarks. At the next flash I see him going down under the water. I grope my way below, sick and faint at heart; and wedging myself into my narrow berth, I try to sleep. But the thunder and the tossing of the ship, and the face of the drowning man, as he said good-by—peering at me from every corner will not let me sleep. Afterward, come quiet seas, over which we boom along, leaving in our track, at night, a broad path of phosphorescent splendor. The sailors bustle around the decks as if they had lost no comrade; and the voyagers losing the pallor of fear, look out earnestly for the land.