seemed to see that could be so beautiful!--the second reef just made fast, men crowding in to run down and hoist away with the rest, till, as they tailed along decks, the three shortened topsails rose faster up against the scud, and their hearty roaring chorus was as loud as the gale. 'Keep her away, my lad,' said the mate, with another wave of his hand; the topsails swelled fair before it, and the Indiaman gave a plunge right through the next sea, rising easily to it, heave after heave. The setting sun struck two or three misty spokes of his wheel through a cloud, that made a big wave here and there glitter; the ship's white yards caught some of it, and a row of broad backs, with their feet stretching the foot-rope as they stowed the foresail, shone bright out, red, blue, and striped, upon the hollow of the yellow fore-topsail, in the midst of the gale; while just under the bowsprit you saw her black figure-head, with his white turban, and his hand to his breast, giving a cool salaam now and then to the spray from her bows. At that moment, though, Lota Hyde's eye was the brightest thing I could find--all the blue gone out of the waves was in it. As for her seeing myself, I hadn't had space to think of it yet, when all of a sudden I noticed her glance light for the first time, as it were, on the mate, who was standing all the while with his back to her on the same plank of the quarter-deck. 'Down main-course!' he sung out, putting one hand in his jacket-pocket; 'down both tacks--that's it, my men--down with it!'--and out it flapped, slapping fiercely as they dragged it by main force into the bulwark-cleets, till it swelled steady above the main-stay, and the old ship sprang forward faster than before, with a wild wash of the Atlantic past her sides. "'Another hand to the wheel, here!' said the first officer. He took a look aloft, leaning to the rise of her bows, then to windward as she rolled; everything looked trim and weatherly, so he stepped to the binnacle, where the lamp was ready lighted; and it just struck me what a smart, good-looking fellow the mate was, with his sunburnt face; and when he went to work, straightforward, no notion of showing off. "'Confound it, though,' thought I of a sudden, seeing _her_ eyes fixed on him again, and then to seaward. 'Mr Macleod,' said he to the second mate, 'send below the watch, if you please. This breeze is first-rate, though!'