"'That left it nasty. The mizzen-mast, bein' the only one left standin', took her down by the stern and the waves runnin' along behind slapped us in the quarters good and proper. The skipper he give us orders to cut away the mizzen-mast, to lighten her. "'It didn't take much cuttin' neither. The axes hadn't more than gotten through one of the weather shrouds, when the gale took the mast and chucked it over the side. That left us with the fore jury-mast that we'd rigged up, but not a stitch of canvas. The ship was as naked as a nigger baby in the Cannibal Islands. "'We did our best with it, of course, and dug up a stretch of storm canvas about the size of a leg-o'-mutton sail and lashed that to the jury foremast and the stump of the bowsprit. With that gale cuttin' off our ears, it was all the sail she could carry. Bill, we had him lashed near the tiller we'd rigged up, not havin' a wheel, and by-n-by, most of us was wishin' we was lashed. But the old hooker stood up under it well, and though she was buried nearly all the time, her nose came right out of the green. "'We'd have done anything in the world to beat north-east, for we knew the hurricane was goin' to the north-westward, but we couldn't do anything but run before the wind in our crippled state and the wind was blowin' north-east. It was shifting northerly and then westerly and we all knew that we were bein' driven into the very middle of the storm. The gale grew fiercer and fiercer, the sea was lashed to a mass of foam and in the shriekin' of the hurricane we couldn't tell, half the time, whether we were under water or above it. "'Bill, with his broken head, stayed put at the tiller, the skipper never went below, Cookie tried to get some grub and the other four of us were lashed to the pumps. It was rainin' in torrents, too, but that didn't make any difference, for there was so much water that you couldn't tell whether it was the waves or the spray or the rain that was drownin' you; all we knew was that we were gaspin' for breath in an atmosphere that seemed about half air and half water. "'Then, quite suddenly, the wind died down, and the rain fell from the sky as though the sea had been picked up and were bein' tilted over the ship. The clouds, racin' by and so low that they seemed almost as if you could reach up and touch them, flew overhead so fast that you couldn't believe it was a real sky you were lookin' at. It seemed like a painted piece of metal driving across the sky on an aeroplane. It fairly made me giddy to watch them. The winds died down, and suddenly became quite calm.