I wonder, though, how these other fellows are getting on in the chains amidships?
Jackson, ahoy!" "Hullo, sir," came a faint hail in answer, from amid the breaking seas further on ahead of us, where only a black spot of a head could be seen occasionally emerging from the mass of encircling foam.
"Are you all right there ?" sang out the captain.
"We're alive, sir; but nearly tired out," replied Jackson in a low weak tone.
"Can't you try, man, to work your way aft and join us," urged Captain Miles, comprehending how exhausted the young seaman and his companions there must be.

"There's plenty of room here for all of us, and you'll not be so much worked about by the sea." "The waves are too strong for us, sir," cried out the other, but his voice now seeming to have a little more courage in it, for he added after a bit, "I think we can manage it, though, if you will make fast the bight of the topsail sheet and heave the end to us.

It will serve us to hold on by as we pass along the bulwarks." "All right, my hearty," answered Captain Miles, he and a couple of the sailors beside him doing as Jackson had suggested.
Then, the captain himself, undoing his lashings, seized one of the brief intervals in which the after part of the hull rose above the sea; when, standing on his feet, while his legs were held by the two sailors, he hove the end of the rope towards Jackson, who, clutching hold of it, secured it to the main-shrouds, whence it was stretched taut to the mizzen rigging, thus serving as a sort of life-line by which the men could pass aft.
When this was done, the men with Jackson in the main-chains crept cautiously along the bulwarks, half in and half out of the water, clutching on to the topsail sheet hand over hand, soon joined us on the quarter galley--the young second mate being the last to leave, waiting until his comrades were in safety.
The passage from the one place to the other was perilous in the extreme; for, the waves surged up sometimes completely over the poor fellows' heads, when they had once abandoned their footing and had only the frail swaying rope to support them against the wash of the water.

They were roughly oscillated to and fro, hove up out of the sea one minute and lowered down again into it the next.
It was a wonder some of them did not fall off, getting sucked under the keel of the ship; but, gripping the life-line with a clutch of desperation, their passage across the perilous bridge was at last safely accomplished, when the entire sixteen of us, including my own humble self, were at length gathered together in one group on the counter-rail below the bend of the poop.

The new-comers were then lashed to the mizzen rigging like the rest of us, and we all waited with what hope and patience we could for the sea to calm down.
By this time, it was late in the afternoon; and, presently, the sun sank down away to the west in his ocean bed, surrounded by a radiant glow of crimson and gold that flashed upward from the horizon to the zenith.
The wind had died away too, the last violent squall which had been so disastrous to the _Josephine_, having been the expiring blast of the hurricane; so, although, as I've said, the sea still continued to run high, the waves rolled by more regularly and with an equal pulsation, as if Father Neptune was rocking himself gradually to sleep.