wings, driving fully eighty or ninety miles an hour, appeared a huge
albatross. He must have been fifteen feet from wing-tip to wing-tip.
He had seen his danger ere we saw him, and, tilting his body on the
blast, he carelessly veered clear of collision. His head and neck
were rimed with age or frost--we could not tell which--and his bright
bead-eye noted us as he passed and whirled away on a great circle
into the snow to leeward.

Margaret's hand shot out to mine.

"It alone was worth the climb!" she cried. And then the Elsinore
flung down, and Margaret's hand clutched tighter for holding, while
from the hidden depths arose the crash and thunder of the great west
wind drift upon our decks.

Quickly as the snow-squall had come, it passed with the same sharp
quickness, and as in a flash we could see the lean length of the ship
beneath us--the main deck full with boiling flood, the forecastle-
head buried in a bursting sea, the lookout, stationed for very life
back on top the for'ard-house, hanging on, head down, to the wind-
drive of ocean, and, directly under us, the streaming poop and Mr.
Mellaire, with a handful of men, rigging relieving tackles on the
tiller. And we saw the Samurai emerge in the lee of the chart-house,
swaying with casual surety on the mad deck, as he spoke what must
have been instructions to Mr. Pike.

The gray circle of the world had removed itself from us for several
hundred yards, and we could see the mighty sweep of sea. Shaggy
gray-beards, sixty feet from trough to crest, leapt out of the
windward murky gray, and in unending procession rushed upon the