“Well, there was ten of us, I think, in the rigging, all hoping to be able to last until daylight, when we thought we might be able to see where we were. Hoping only--’twas not expecting--for ’twas getting colder, with the spray beginning to freeze where it struck and making hard work of holding on to the rigging. ’Twas wild--her sails still up, with the reef points beating a devil’s tattoo where the canvas warn’t tearing up and flying out like long-tailed, ghostly things in the blackness. Lashed to the rigging we must’ve been for all of two hours, I cal’late. Some began to take note of the numbness creeping over them--one or two--the most discouraged. The warmer-blooded, or the strongest, tried to keep up a cheering talk--tried to crack jokes and one thing or another. “Well, we had hope, some of us, of lasting through the night, when crack! We knew what was coming then. I slipped the half-hitch that had been holding me to the shrouds and climbed higher. I was ’most to the mast-head, clear of the gaff, when over the side went her forem’st, half a dozen men clinging to the forerigging, a-swaying and shaking; and after it went the mainm’st, with four more, I think, in her rigging. “Well, sir, when the forem’st went I was thrown into clear water. I had plenty of line to my hand, with a turn of it around the mast-head, and with that I hauled myself back. I hung on to an arm of the cross-trees for a while there before I started to work my way back along the mast toward the vessel. I didn’t believe then I’d ever live to reach the vessel. The sail, as I said, had been kept standing on her, and now it was lying flat on the water, now sagging down with the weight of the water over it, and now bellying into the air when a great sea would get under it. I saw a shadow of a man--hanging on to a reef point he was--go down with that sail once, then go up with it once, and then the sail split under the weight of the sea, and I never saw him again. But I heard him holler as he went. What he said I don’t know-- I had to keep on crawling. The hoops of the sail were around the mast, of course, and I used them and the bolt-rope of the fores’l where the sail was torn away to pull myself along. And, mind you, I had to watch out for the forem’st itself. It reared and tossed with one sea after another--me astride it most of the time--like a man on horseback, though hard riding enough I found it. The least little tap of that, and I knew where I’d be--bait for the fishes that I’d baited for so often. Well, between the hoops and the bolt-rope and the rigging I hauled myself along. And the way that mast rolled! Forty times I swear I thought I was good as dead. But no. And so I dragged myself along, watching out when I went upon the crests and holding my breath when I was pulled down into the depths--hung on desperately, mindful that the quietest knock of that big spar would end me then and there, and mindful, too, that once my grip loosed I’d be