h is the conventional signal for help, and at the
same time a reply to the call for help; and it was only when this
evoked no further call that I remembered that the cry was that of a
puma.

As usual I lived alone, save for the weekly visit of my guide bringing
me bread and my post. It was with the greatest reluctance that I
obeyed the necessity to return to the state of civilization, and
took leave of that most charming retreat of the natural man from the
artificial life. That was my last serious experience of woodland
life. The uneasy and thriftless spirit which drove me out, like the
possessed of the Scripture, to wander in strange places at times,
again drove me that winter to England, putting, as it happened,
against my intention or prevision, an end to the American period of my
life.

CHAPTER XVI

ENGLAND AGAIN

I have generally been happy at sea; and when not so, it has been from
reasons apart from the sea itself,--preoccupations which kept me
insensible to the old charm, or mental troubles which made me
insensible to everything beside them. On this voyage I had the
company of an old friend of the days of "The Crayon," one of our most
thoughtful and successful portrait painters, George Fuller, and a
young friend of his, a Mr. Ames. We sailed just before Christmas, in
an old sailing ship of about eight hundred tons burthen; for, unless
time is of importance, I prefer a sailing ship to a steamer, and one
pleasant companion is worth a shipload of commonplace fellow-voyagers.
A stiff westerly blow caught us off Sandy Hook, and never left us till
we were halfway across the Atlantic, increasing in violence every day,
until it gave me, what I had always longed for, but never seen, a
first-class gale on the open ocean.

I had said to the captain (one of the old sort of Cape Cod sailors,
still a young man, however) that I wanted to see a real gale; and one
day, after we had been out nearly a week, he called me up on deck,
saying, "You wanted to see a gale, and now you may see it; for unless
you get into a tornado you will never see anything worse than this." I
went on deck, obliged to hold firmly to the rails or some part of the
rigging, for the wind was such as to have carried me overboard if I
had attempted to stand alone on the quarter-deck. We were running with
the wind dead abaft, under a reefed fore-topsail and a storm
jib, everything else having been taken in the night before. The
studding-sail boom