I, too, bore a hand with another swab, as did Finlayson; and we soon made the place all shipshape again, another wave, which washed down the hatchway when we had finished, putting a polish on our work. Nothing further was seen of `Ugly,' however, either by Mick or myself, the ill-tempered brute evidently keeping out of our way; and it was not till late in the afternoon that I saw him again aft, when both watches were called to treble-reef the topsails, and we boys belonging to the ship had to go aloft to take in the mizzen. We had not weathered Finisterre yet, though we had been bucketing about in the Bay now for over three days; the wind, which had been blowing in strong squalls from the north'ard and west'ard, suddenly backing to the south-east and coming on to blow harder than ever. The sea got up also in a corresponding degree, its huge billows, as they rolled onward propelled by the gale, rearing themselves up in mid-air till they seemed sometimes to be level with the top of our mainmast, surpassing in height even those which my old friend Larrikins had described as `mountings 'igh.' I had seen already in my trips in the _Martin_ up and down Channel what I fancied at the time to be rough weather; but, never in my life previously had I ever seen such a scene of grandeur as the ocean presented that stormy afternoon! Far and wide, it seethed and boiled like a huge cauldron, its surface covered with foam as white as snow, which the dark setting of inky clouds along the horizon brought out in whiter relief. Above, masses of ragged wrack scudded aimlessly across the sky, whose leaden hue was cheerless and grim, save where, in the west, the sun went down suddenly in a wrath of crimson majesty, the darkness of night descending on the scene as if a curtain of _crepe_, had been let down the moment after he vanished beneath the waste of angry waters, unlightened by a single ray of his customary after-glow. Apparently the tempest-loving demons of the deep were only waiting for the shades of night in order to carry on their revels with the greater `go' at our expense; for no sooner had the evening closed in than the gale increased in force, and the sea waxed even angrier, so that by Four Bells in the first watch, that is at ten o'clock, in landsman's parlance, the ship had to lie-to under storm staysails--pitching and plunging bows under, and taking in some of the huge rollers occasionally over her forecastle, that swept down into the waist to such an extent that it was as much as the scuppers could do to get rid of the water as she rolled.