She flung the foam from her bows; the spray breaking aft as far as the gangway.  She was going at a prodigious rate.  Still, everything held.  Preventer braces were reeved and hauled taut; tackles got upon the backstays; and everything done to keep all snug and strong.  The captain walked the deck at a rapid stride, looked aloft at the sails, and then to windward; the mate stood in the gangway, rubbing his hands, and talking aloud to the ship—­“Hurrah, old bucket! the Boston girls have got hold of the towrope!” and the like; and we were on the forecastle looking to see how the spars stood it, and guessing the rate at which she was going,—­when the captain called out—­“Mr. Brown, get up the topmast studding sail!  What she can’t carry she may drag!”

The mate looked a moment; but he would let no one be before him in daring.  He sprang forward,—­“Hurrah, men! rig out the topmast studding sail boom!  Lay aloft, and I’ll send the rigging up to you!” We sprang aloft into the top; lowered a girtline down, by which we hauled up the rigging; rove the tacks and halyards; ran out the boom and lashed it fast, and sent down the lower halyards as a preventer.  It was a clear starlight night, cold and blowing; but everybody worked with a will.  Some, indeed, looked as though they thought the “old man” was mad, but no one said a word.

We had had a new topmast studding sail made with a reef in it,—­a thing hardly ever heard of, and which the sailors had ridiculed a good deal, saying that when it was time to reef a studding sail it was time to take it in.  But we found a use for it now; for, there being a reef in the topsail, the studding sail could not be set without one in it also.  To be sure, a studding sail with reefed topsails was rather a novelty; yet there was some reason in it, for if we carried that away, we should lose only a sail and a boom; but a whole topsail might have carried away the mast and all.

While we were aloft, the sail had been got out, bent to the yard, reefed, and ready for hoisting.  Waiting for a good opportunity, the halyards were manned and the yard hoisted fairly up to the block; but when the mate came to shake the cat’s-paw out of the downhaul, and we began to boom end the sail, it shook the ship to her center.  The boom buckled up and bent like a whipstick, and we looked every moment to see something go; but, being of the short, tough upland spruce, it bent like whalebone, and nothing could break it.  The carpenter said it was the best stick he had ever seen.

The strength of all hands soon brought the tack to the boom end, and the sheet was trimmed down, and the preventer and the weather brace hauled taut to take off the strain.  Every rope-yarn seemed stretched to the utmost, and every thread of canvas; and with this sail added to her, the ship sprang through the water like a thing possessed.  The sail being nearly all forward, it lifted her out of the water, and she seemed actually to jump from sea to sea.  From the time her keel was laid, she had never been so driven; and had it been life or death with everyone of us, she could not have borne another stitch of canvas.