“A point more in the wind’s eye.”
“Harder yet, harder.”
“Ay, ay, sir.”
“How now?”
“Another point, sir.”
The crisis had now come. Bending almost to the horizon, under the enormous press of her canvass, the schooner groaned and struggled against the seas, and for one moment of intense agony, during which we held our breaths painfully, and even forgot the cries of the sufferers upon our lee, we thought that all was over; but, although the schooner staggered under the successive shocks, she did not yield, and as the last billow sank away, whitening beneath her lee, and we rose gallantly upon its crest, the rocky reef shot away astern, and we were safe. As the wreck vanished in the gloom behind, the cries of her despairing passengers came mingled with the roar of the tempest, in awful distinctness, to our ears.
THE OUTLAW LOVER.
———
BY J. H. DANA.