The men were glad enough to secure the guns; but it was a time of too much anxiety and excitement for any to quit the deck, where they remained, filling each other's ears with marvellous legends of mysterious barks which their friends, in like situations, had beheld, and which had melted away like thin mist when the first grey tints of morn appeared. At length the wished-for dawn began gradually to dissipate the terrific obscurity of the night, and all doubts as to the reality of the stranger bark were removed by perceiving her still broad on their beam under her two closely-reefed topsails. The wild confusion which reigned supreme on the waste of waters was rather magnified by the dim uncertain light of morning: the waves, with foaming crests, leaping madly around, the thick misty clouds flying rapidly along, one lawyer, as it were, above the other, through which not a ray of the sun's beams could escape to cheer the voyagers--all was cold, dreary, and threatening. The gale, too, which had given promise of falling during the latter hours of the night, now again, as if recovering strength with the returning day, increased with such sudden fury, that, before any warning was given, the main-topsail was blown clear off the bolt-ropes, rent into a thousand shreds, with a loud report like a near clap of thunder, and, flying over the fore-topsail-yard, was carried far out of sight ahead. "Get a new main-topsail on deck," shouted the Commander, in momentary expectation of seeing the fore-topsail share the same fate; "we must not be without our wings with yonder stranger in our neighbourhood," he added, turning to Don Luis. "These are the variations of a sea-life, my young friend,--a day of sunshine and calm, and two of clouds and tempest." "Away aloft, and bend the new sail," cried the Captain, after a minute's silence. "The enemy keeps steadily on her course, as if there were no such beings as ourselves in existence." By the time that the fresh topsail was got aloft, and bent to the yard by the willing seamen, broad daylight was on the world of waters. "Hoist our colours, and let him know who we are," exclaimed the Captain; but when the flag of Portugal blew wildly from the peak, no answering signal was made by the stranger, though, being not a mile distant, he must clearly have perceived it. "He suspects those are not our true colours," observed the first Lieutenant.