Day broke and passed in a fog, that left them in much the same uncertainty as before about their position.  For one moment it had lifted, and they fancied they had seen “Homborgsund’s Fald,” a high landmark up the country above Arendal, and from its lowness and dimness on the horizon, they had been encouraged to hope that they had appreciably increased their distance from the coast.  About noon they passed an English brig that had been through the same struggle as the Juno was now engaged upon, whose signals of distress they had already occasionally heard faintly upon the wind, and which now seemed on the point of foundering.  The crew had climbed into the after-rigging, which was all that now remained standing, and they made despairing signs for help; but it was impossible to render any.  They had enough to do to keep themselves afloat.

The gale showed no signs of moderating, and that night, as Salve Kristiansen and another were taking their turn at the wheel, there gleamed suddenly out of the pitchy darkness to leeward of the fore-rigging the white crest of a tremendous eddy wave, which a moment after came crashing down upon the deck, carrying clean away the round-house, binnacle, and long-boat, damaging the wheel, and leaving many of the drenched and half—­suffocated sailors deposited in the most unexpected places, and only glad to find that they still had the deck under them.

“Ugly sea on the lee-bow!” was heard again from forward, and all in that direction seemed suddenly to have become a mass of white.

“Ready about!—­hard a-lee!” and with a great lurch the old craft went about once more, the renewed shrieking in every kind of pitch in the rigging, and the blinding dash of spray, showing to what a hurricane the gale had risen.

Salve had been too much occupied with the damaged wheel at first to have a thought to spare for anything else; but it recurred to him very soon that when that first dark sea had broken over them so unexpectedly from leeward, he had seen for a moment the glimmer of two lights on its crest, and a world of associations was at once aroused in his mind:  it seemed to the lad’s romantic fancy that he was keeping an appointment with Elizabeth Raklev.  As he glanced hurriedly back, the two light-dots again appeared.  He had seen them too often before to be mistaken, and he shouted over his shoulder to the captain, who noticed them now for the first time, “Those lights behind to leeward are from old Jacob’s hearth on Torungen!”

“Are you sure of that?” muttered Beck, coming nearer to him at the same time over the sloping deck with the help of a rope.  “If they are, it will not be long before we are dashed to atoms on the rocks.”

A conversation ensued between them, in which Salve declared that he had known the water under Torungen from childhood as well as he did his father’s garden; and the upshot was that Beck, pale and hesitating, determined to go in under land with him as pilot.