“Up came Lieutenant Joyce, looking as if he had seen a ghost in the cabin.

“’The mercury, sir, is falling just as rapidly as it would rise if you plunged it into boiling water:  an inch a minute or so!”

“Our captain saw the danger instantly, and, brave as Trueman is, I never saw a man look paler.

“To drive all the passengers below, and pen them in with closed hatches and storm-shutters, (so hot, Emmy, that the black-hole of Calcutta must have been an ice-house to it:  how the foolish people abused our wise skipper, and more than one pompous old Indian threatened him with an action for false imprisonment!) this huddling away was the first effort; and simultaneously with it, the crew were all over the rigging, furling sails, hurriedly, hurriedly.

“Meanwhile (for I was last on deck), that little cloud seemed whirling within itself, and many others gathered round it, all dancing about on the horizon, as if sheaves of mischief tossed about by devils:  I don’t wish to be poetical, Emmy, for my heart is very, very sad; but if ever the powers of the air sow the wind and reap the whirlwind, they were gathering in their harvest at that door.  Underneath the skipping clouds, which came on quickly, leaping over each other, as when the wain is loaded by a score of hands, I noticed a sea approaching, such as Pharaoh must have seen, when the wall of waters fell upon him; and premonitory winds came whistling by, and two or three sails were flapping in them still, and I was hurried down stairs after all the rest of us.

“Then, on a sudden, it appeared not winds, nor waves, nor thunder, but as if the squadroned cavalry of heaven had charged across the seas, and crushed our battered ship beneath their horse-hoofs!  We were flung down flat on our beam ends; and the two or three unfurled sails, bursting with the noise of a cannon, were scattered miles away to lee-ward as if they had been paper.  As for the poor fellows in the rigging, the spirit of the storm had already made them his:  twenty of our men were swept away by that tornado.

“Then there was hewing and cleaving on deck, the clatter of many axes and hatchets:  for we were in imminent danger of being capsized, keel uppermost, and our only chance was to cut away the masts.

“The muscles of courage were tried then, my Emmy, and the strength which religion gives a man.  I felt sensibly held up by the Everlasting Arms:  I could listen to the still small Voice in the midst of a crash which might have been the end of all things:  though in darkness, God had given me light; though in uttermost peril, my peace was never calmer in our little village school.