“At sea,” said the mate, “there is no imagining how matters come about. I allow that the three men have been taken off by some passing vessel. Anyway, we’ve done our bit, and the capt’n I expect’ll be waiting for us. Thunder! how she rolls,” he cried, as a very heavy lurch sent us both reeling towards the side of the craft. “Hark!” cried I, “we are hailed from the deck.” “Below there!” shouted a voice in the companion hatch. “They’ve fired a gun aboard the Indiaman, sir, and have run the ensign up half-masted. The weather looks mighty queer, sir.” “Ha!” cried the mate; “come along, Mr. Catesby.” We walked cautiously and with difficulty aft, gained the companion ladder and ascended. My instant glance went to the _Ruby_. She had furled her mainsail and fore and mizzen top-gallant-sails, hauled down her lighter staysails and big standing jib, and as I glanced at her a gun winked in a quarter-deck port, and the small thunder of it rolled sulkily up against the wind. In fact, whilst we were below the breeze had chopped clean round and the _Ruby_ was to leeward of the wreck, with a very heavy swell rolling along its former course, the wind dead the other way, beginning to whiten the ridges on each huge round-backed fold, and a white thickness--a flying squall of vapor it looked to me, with a seething and creaming line of water along the base of it as though it was something solid that was coming along--sweeping within half-a-mile of the wreck right down upon us. The mate sent a look at it and uttered a cry. “Haul the boat alongside,” he shouted to the fellow in her. “Handsomely now, lads. Stand by to jump into her,” he cried to the seaman who had been the first to spring on board the wreck with the end of the line. They brought the boat humming and buzzing to the counter; the sailor standing on the taffrail plumped into her like a cannon-shot; ’twas wonderful he didn’t scuttle her. The mate whipping the painter off the pin or whatever it was that it had been belayed to held it by a turn whilst he bawled to me to watch my chance and jump. But the wreck lying dead in the trough was rolling in quite a frenzied way, like a see-saw desperately worked. Her movements, combined with the soaring and falling of the boat, were absolutely confounding. I would gather myself together for a spring and then, before I could make it, the boat was sliding as it might seem to me twenty or thirty feet deep and away. “Jump, for God’s sake, sir!” cried the mate. “I don’t mean to break my neck,” I answered, irritable with the nervous flurry that had come to me with a sudden abominable sense of incapacity and helplessness.