We were dropping down out of the Bay of Naples.  Though we weighed anchor in early morning, it was past noon before we cleared the Bocca di Capri, for there was hardly wind enough to give the Petrel steerage-way.  The smoke from our long Turkish pipes mounted almost straight upward, and lingered over our heads in thin blue curls; yet the sullen, discontented heave and roll in the water were growing heavier every hour.  The black tufa cliffs crested with shattered masonry—­the foundations of the sty where the Boar of Capreae wallowed—­were just on our starboard quarter, when Riddell, the master, came up to Livingstone.  “I think we’d better make all snug, sir,” he said.  “There’s dirty weather to windward, and we haven’t too much sea-room.”  He was an old man-of-war’s boatswain, and had had a tussle, in his time, on every sea and ocean in the known world, with every wind that blows.  He had rather a contempt for the Mediterranean, esteeming it just one degree above the Cowes Roads, and attaching about as much importance to its vagaries as one might do to the fractiousness of a spoiled child.  If he had been caught in the most terrible tempest that ever desolated the shores of the Great Lake, I don’t believe he would have called it any thing but “dirty weather.”  He was too good a sailor, though, not to take all precautions, even if he had been sailing on a piece of ornamental water; and he went quickly forward to give the necessary orders, after getting a nod of assent from Guy.

The latter raised himself lazily on his arm, so as to see all round over the low bulwarks.  There was a blue-black bank of cloud rolling up from the southwest.  Puffs of wind, with no coolness in them, but dry and uncertain as if stirred by some capricious artificial means, struck the sails without filling them, and drove the Petrel through the water by fits and starts.

“I really believe we are going to have a white squall,” Guy remarked, indifferently.  “Well, we shall see how the boat behaves.  Riddell only spoke just in time.”

Suddenly his tone changed, and he said, quickly and decidedly, “Hold on every thing!”

The master turned his weatherwise eye toward the quarter where the danger lay, and frowned.  “We’re none too soon with it, Mr. Livingstone.  If there’s a yard too much canvas spread when that reaches us, I won’t answer for the spars.”

Deeper and deeper the blackness came rushing down upon us, an angry ridge of foam before it—­the white squall showing its teeth.

Guy took the old man by the arm, and pointed to an object to leeward that none on board had remarked yet.  It was a small barca with four men in it.  They were Capriotes, as we found afterward, the boldest boatmen in the Bay.  Had they been pure-bred Neapolitans, they would have been down on their faces long ago, screaming out prayers to a long muster-roll of saints.  As it was, they stood manfully to their oars, straining every muscle to reach us; there was no other safety for them then.  “They will never get alongside in time, unless we bear down to meet them,” Livingstone said, “and what chance will they have in ten minutes hence?”