The vessel was hurried on by the increasing wind, until she came to where the river makes a sudden bend, the only one in the whole course of its majestic career.[15] Just as they turned the point, a violent flaw of wind came sweeping down a mountain gully, bending the forest before it, and, in a moment, lashing up the river into white froth and foam.  The captain saw the danger, and cried out to lower the sail.  Before the order could be obeyed, the flaw struck the sloop, and threw her on her beam-ends.  Everything was now fright and confusion:  the flapping of the sails, the whistling and rushing of the wind, the bawling of the captain and crew, the shrieking of the passengers, all mingled with the rolling and bellowing of the thunder.  In the midst of the uproar, the sloop righted; at the same time the mainsail shifted, the boom came sweeping the quarter-deck, and Dolph, who was gazing unguardedly at the clouds, found himself, in a moment, floundering in the river.

[Footnote 15:  This must have been the bend at West-Point.]

For once in his life, one of his idle accomplishments was of use to him.  The many truant hours which he had devoted to sporting in the Hudson, had made him an expert swimmer, yet, with all his strength and skill, he found great difficulty in reaching the shore.  His disappearance from the deck had not been noticed by the crew, who were all occupied by their own danger.  The sloop was driven along with inconceivable rapidity.  She had hard work to weather a long promontory on the eastern shore, round which the river turned, and which completely shut her from Dolph’s view.

It was on a point of the western shore that he landed, and, scrambling up the rocks, he threw himself, faint and exhausted, at the foot of a tree.  By degrees, the thunder-gust passed over.  The clouds rolled away to the east, where they lay piled in feathery masses, tinted with the last rosy rays of the sun.  The distant play of the lightning might be seen about the dark bases, and now and then might be heard the faint muttering of the thunder.  Dolph rose, and sought about to see if any path led from the shore; but all was savage and trackless.  The rocks were piled upon each other; great trunks of trees lay shattered about, as they had been blown down by the strong winds which draw through these mountains, or had fallen through age.  The rocks, too, were overhung with wild vines and briers, which completely matted themselves together, and opposed a barrier to all ingress; every movement that he made, shook down a shower from the dripping foliage.  He attempted to scale one of these almost perpendicular heights; but, though strong and agile, he found it an Herculean undertaking.  Often he was supported merely by crumbling projections of the rock, and sometimes he clung to roots and branches of trees, and hung almost suspended in the air.  The wood-pigeon came cleaving his whistling flight by him, and the eagle screamed from the brow of the