The ship looked wrecked aloft. All her spars were standing indeed, but her mizzentopsail hung in rags, and the bolt ropes made a skeleton of the fabric aft. The foresail was split in halves, and with each weary roll gaped like a cut in an india-rubber ball when pressed. Rags of the outer jib fluttered from lacing or hanks. The maintopgallantsail had been blown loose and had gone to pieces, and was shaking from the yard in lengths like Irish pennants in the rigging. The ship was rolling drearily, and the channels would often slap white thunder out of the sulky brow of the swell, and she groaned greatly throughout her length and made some dim sound of lamentation aloft. Hardy stood alone at the wheel. He was fresh from a long and desperate fight with the sea, and you read the character of the struggle in his face. His beard was a week old: in the hollows under his eyes lay a little whiteness, the encrustation of salt; this gave him the ghastly look of the life-boat man who steps ashore after standing two nights and a day by a stranded ship with frozen figures in her shrouds. His hair was a little long, and this gave a something of wildness to his aspect. His looks were haggard, his eyes wanting in their usual lustre, his lips were pale; he looked worn. For ten days he and Julia had been fighting a gale of wind. In ten days they had managed to obtain but two or three hours sleep in a day of twenty-four hours. But happily for them it never blew so hard but that they could keep their course shaped for the English Channel. It never blew so hard that a ship well manned would have needed to heave to. It came in roaring weight upon the quarter, and one midnight the mizzentopsail burst in a blast of cannon, and shortly after the maintopgallantsail was blown into shreds out of the gaskets, and next morning, in the screaming fury of a bleaching squall, the outer jib flew into pennons from the stay, and the veil of the fore-course was rent asunder. But the reefed maintopsail, the foretopmast-staysail, and the inner jib were as faithful to their duty as Tom Bowline in the song, and the ship rushed on in foam to the figurehead, whitening acres of the sea abaft her, passing a brig hove to in the haze; passed by a ship that would not stay to speak; passed by a Fruiter schooner from the Western Islands, whose spring over the surge was the glance of the albatross, whose envanishment in the haze ahead, into which the _York_ was for ever rushing, was the extinction of a meteor in a cloud. And now the gale was gone the sea would shortly smooth its panting breast; it was the early forenoon. Hardy called the dog, but he did not exert the powerful voice that was familiar to Julia. The Newfoundland came out of its kennel and looked up in affectionate expectation at the sailor. "Go below and bring her up!" said Hardy, pointing, and the dog perfectly understanding disappeared down the companionway.