With his hand on the engine-room telegraph, the captain gave the men at the wheel a course to conform to that of the _Lymptania_. Quick as a cat on her helm, the _Zip_ swung swiftly through eight points and plunged ahead. This brought on her bows seas that had been rolling up abeam, and we were up against the real thing at last. The first sea, which she caught while she was still turning, the _Zip_ contented herself with slicing off the truculently-tossing top of before crunching it underfoot. It was a smartly-executed performance, and seemed to promise encouragingly as to the way she might be expected to dispose of the next ones. The second in line, however, which she met head-on and essayed the same tactics with, dampened her ardour--and just about everything and everybody else below the foretop--by detaching a few tons of its bumptious bulk and raking her fore-and-aft with its rumbling green-white flood. The bridge was above the main weight of that blow, but 'midships and aft I saw men bracing themselves against a knee-deep stream. One bareheaded and bare-armed man, who had evidently been surprised in making his way from one hatch to another, I saw rolled fifteen or twenty feet and slammed up against the torpedo-tube which prevented his going overboard. He limped out of sight, rubbing his shoulder, and probably never knew how lucky he was in being caught by _that_ wave instead of one which came along a minute later. The slams which she received from the next two or three seas left the _Zip_ in a somewhat chastened mood, and rather less sanguine respecting her ability to go on pulling off that little stunt of surmounting waves by biting them in the neck and then trampling their bodies under foot. She was beginning to realise that she had a body of her own, and that there was something else around that could bite--yes, and kick, and gouge, and punch below the belt, and do all the other low-down tricks of the underhand fighter. Languid and uncertain of movement, like a dazed prize-fighter, she was just steadying herself from the jolt a bustling brute of a comber had dealt her in passing, when the skyline ahead was blotted out by the imminent green-black loom of a running wall of water which, from its height and steepness, might well have been kicked up by a Valparaiso "Norther" or a South Sea hurricane.