“Will you not send for the gunner, sir?” said the third.  Splinter did not like it, I saw, and this quailed me.

The captain’s bell rang.  “What smell of brimstone is that, steward?”

“I really can’t tell,” said the man, trembling from head to foot; “Mr. Splinter has sent for the gunner, sir.”

“The devil!” said Deadeye, as he hurried on deck.  We all followed.  A search was made.

“Some matches have caught in the magazine,” said one.

“We shall be up and away like sky-rockets,” said another.

Several of the American masters ran out on the jib-boom, coveting the temporary security of being so far removed from the seat of the expected explosion, and all was alarm and confusion, until it was ascertained that two of the boys, little sky-larking vagabonds, had stolen some pistol cartridges, and had been making lightning, as it is called, by holding a lighted candle between the fingers, and putting some loose powder into the palm of the hand, then chucking it up into the flame.  They got a sound flogging, on a very unpoetical part of their corpuses, and once more the ship subsided into her usual orderly discipline.  The northwester still continued, with a clear blue sky, without a cloud overhead by day, and a bright cold moon by night.  It blew so hard for the three succeeding days, that we could not carry more than close-reefed topsails to it, and a reefed foresail.  Indeed, towards six bells in the forenoon watch of the third day, it came thundering down with such violence, and the sea increased so much, that we had to hand the foretopsail.

This was by no means an easy job.  “Ease her a bit,” said the first lieutenant,—­“there—­shake the wind out of her sails for a moment, until the men get the canvas in”——­whirl, a poor fellow pitched off the lee foreyardarm into the sea.  “Up with the helm—­heave him the bight of a rope.”  We kept away, but all was confusion, until an American midshipman, one of the prisoners on board, hove the bight of a rope at him.  The man got it under his arms, and after hauling him along for a hundred yards at the least—­and one may judge of the velocity with which he was dragged through the water, by the fact that it took the united strain of ten powerful men to get him in—­he was brought safely on board, pale and blue, when we found that the running of the rope had crushed in his broad chest, below his arms, as if it had been a girl’s waist, indenting the very muscles of it and of his back half an inch deep.  He had to be bled before he could breathe, and it was an hour before the circulation could be restored, by the joint exertions of the surgeon and gunroom steward, chafing him with spirits and camphor, after he had been stripped and stowed away between the blankets in his hammock.