While a man would be drawing on a pair of rubber-boots it came--oh, whistling! And four hours of it followed. Wind to blow a man's ears off. And rain! Oh, rain! Not rain in sheets--nothing so soft and easy as that; but rain which came driving in like a billion bullets at once. We could pick out where every one hit us. The wind blew maybe eighty miles an hour for four hours. And then the real thing came. For an hour or so more wind really blew. How many miles? Lord knows. John said a good hundred miles. Bill snorted: "A hunderd? Take on'y what's above a hunderd an' you'd git a gale by itself!" With all the wind there was a high-running sea; and wind and sea together were driving us into shoal water. And the shoal water of Georges is bad--no worse anywhere. We sounded and got ten fathoms. Bad. There was nothing but to make a little more sail and get out. Put jumbo and trysail to her, was the word; as we started to do that a forepeak block came away, and the halyards and block got fouled with the jib-stay aloft. The skipper sent John and me aloft to clear it. We went; and were lying out to get it, when we saw this sea come at us. It was a white yeast all around the vessel, but this one was a solid white, solid as marble almost. It came roaring like a mad bull at us. I took one peek at it and "Hang on, John!" I yelled. I did my best to leave the print of my fingers on the steel stay with the way I hung on myself--we were both of us to the masthead and that sea was just high enough to roll over our heads. I could just see a light-green color over my head as it passed. As we stuck our heads through and looked at each other, John was saying something. There was a ringing in my ears. I asked him: "What? What did you say, John?" "You told me to hang on," said John. "To hang on! Lard Gard, boy, did y' think I was goin' to dive into it?" On deck when they saw it coming they had all jumped below and pulled the hatches after them. They began to come out now, and the skipper called for us to come down. Nothing was washed from her deck. Of course, everything before that had been double-lashed--dories and barrels of gasolene--before that. The skipper now ordered the bung pulled from a full barrel of gasolene. We stove one in and let the oil run out; and the seas calmed to leeward and we threw a dory to the lee rail, after lashing an empty gasolene barrel to each side of her. "Whoever's handiest jump in!" yelled the skipper. Big Bill was handy to the dory, but he never would have made it if John hadn't stopped to push him over the gunnel from behind. Shorty and Oliver leaped over the other gunnel. I waited for John; but the skipper had called "More oil and another dory!" and John had turned back.