"Hard up with your helm, my man; hard up, and let her pay off before it!"  I shouted to the man at the helm, while the sound that I had heard increased rapidly in volume, and a long line of white foam, rendered luminous by the phosphorescent state of the water, appeared broad on our starboard beam, sweeping down upon us with appalling velocity. Fortunate was it for us that a preliminary puff had come to help us, for it lasted just long enough to permit the little hooker to gather steerage way and partially to pay off, far enough, that is to say, to bring the onrushing hurricane well over her starboard quarter.  Indeed, had the gale happened to strike us square abeam, and with no way on the ship, I am convinced that she must have inevitably turned turtle with us.  As it was, when, a few minutes later, the wind swooped down upon us with the fury of a famished wild beast leaping upon its prey, and with a mad babel of terrifying howls and shrieks that utterly baffles description, the little vessel heeled down beneath its first stroke until her lee rail was buried, and the water rose to the level of her hatchway coamings; and but for the fact that she was at that moment not only forging ahead, but also paying off, there would have been an end of all hands, then and there.  For what seemed to be, in our anxious condition, a veritable age, but which was probably no more than a brief half-minute, the little vessel lay there, quivering in every timber, and seemed paralysed with terror, as though she were a sentient thing.  The wind yelled and raved through her rigging, and the spindrift and scud- water--showing ghostly in the phosphorescent light emitted by the tormented waters--flew over us in blinding, drenching showers.  Then, with a sudden jerk the schooner rose almost upright and, with the water foaming about her bows to the level of her head rails, she sped away to leeward at a pace that seemed absolutely impossible to even so swift a craft as she had proved herself to be.