_It was a man-of-war in full sail, looming up like a mountain._ It came out of the fog so suddenly, that it seemed as though the mist had taken form from itself. It was bearing straight down across the port bow of the _Nancy Hazlewood_, plunging forward as solemnly as death. It could not have been more than six or seven ships’ lengths distant, and the great sails bellying out like big clouds, shadowed over the _Nancy Hazlewood_ as _she_ might have shadowed over a fishing smack. Ten seconds more and she would have been down upon them, and would have crushed the little craft as though she had been made of paper. There was a moment of silence as great as though every man aboard of the _Nancy Hazlewood_ had been turned to stone. I remember that Tom Granger stood with his newly-lighted pipe in his hand, never moving a hair. The silence was only for an instant, though, for the next moment a voice roared like a trumpet: “Hard a starboard! Let go, head sheets and lee head braces!” It was Jack Baldwin’s voice, and never did Tom hear it ring as it did at that moment. It not only was heard through the ship, but it pealed through it like a clap of thunder. Those below came tumbling up helter-skelter, and the captain came running out of his cabin, for there was a ring in Jack’s voice that told every man aboard of the ship that great danger was down upon them. It seemed to break the stillness around just as a stone dropped into a well might break the stillness below. In an instant the braces were flung from the belaying-pins, and the ship came up toward the wind without a second to lose. Before those aboard of the frigate had gathered their wits she had passed alongside, and so close that a child could easily have pitched a biscuit aboard of the _Nancy Hazlewood_ from the decks that loomed twenty feet above her. The whole thing was over in a dozen seconds, but those dozen seconds are stamped on Tom Granger’s mind as clearly as though they were chiseled in marble. Even now, though he is over eighty years old, he can see that great frigate rising higher and higher as she surges forward, towering over the little ship, while a hundred faces pop up above the rail and stare down upon her decks. It was only a moment—a thread of time—on which hung the chance as to whether she would clear or not. There was a thunderous roar of the waters under the bow, flung back in an echo from the wooden walls of the frigate; there was a vision of open ports rushing by, and of scared faces crowded at them, in spite of discipline; then the frigate was astern and the danger gone past with her. But in that short moment of passing they saw enough to make them know that she was a British cruiser.