Laura Brayton — page 158: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

LAURA BRAYTON. | | 149 Heavier and heavier yet rolled the great ground- swell, until the ship, divested of nearly all her can- vas, with her lightest spars housed or sent down, rolled till the tips of her lower yards at times act- ually dipped in the green waves, for without steer- age way the ship had worked into the trough. But stays and braces were all taut, the rigging well set up, boats and inboard spars all snugly lashed, her cargo buoyant, no one used to it cared for the roll, too often had they been rocked in the “cradle of the deep,” to be terrified then. “How will it come?” asked the captain, fully two hours after the ship was snug, for he saw the pilot still anxiously pacing the deck and watching the horizon as he did so. “There away!” said the pilot, quietly, looking rather than pointing to a line of black just heaving in sight to the northwest, “but it is coming too quick to last from there long. See, it rises fast. I believe we'll have a regular old-time hurricane, and if we do it willtake the sweep of the circle before its strength is gone. Itis twenty years since we had the last one, or more, maybe. Iremember ’twasa screamer and strewed the whole coast with wrecks. The boat I was in got before it and went clear to the Bermudas and then got blowed back to the coast and went high and dry on Roanoke beach. See how those clouds come up!” “Yes, we must take what is coming with only enough head sail on to get us before it!” said the captain. Then he gave the necessary orders, and with only ‘a fore-storm staysail set, all the large hatchways securely battened down, life-lines rove all around (Efe) comicbooks