sea breaking over the side
till the channels were full, and pouring over the bows in green
torrents, and then in blinding deluges of spray and water over the
stern; tearing along ten knots an hour, and yet always seeming to
be left behind by the waves that tore by us,--the great waves, that
obeyed the wind only to be crushed down again by it, spurting up here
and there fitfully in pinnacles which were instantly driven off in
foam and froth; no combing waves, such as the land dweller sees,
for no wave could rise enough to comb,--only great hills of water,
crystalline with wavelets, streaked with spun foam, heaving as if from
a blind impulse, and leaving us, in a contemptuous toleration, to keep
afloat if we could. And now and then two great waves raced each other,
as they will at long intervals, till they ran close to each other and
united, and we were thrown aloft a little higher, to see nothing more
than a wild waste of foam, spray, and watery chaos which defies human
language to express it.

This was the sea as I had wanted to see it, and as no painter has ever
painted, or probably ever will paint it, and as very few could ever
have seen it; for in seventy thousand miles of sea travel I have seen
it only once. For three days and nights our captain never left the
bridge to rest. Of two other ships that left New York the same day
that we did, one was dismasted to the south of us, and the other had
her quarters stove in and barely escaped foundering just to the north
of us. The gale blew out and left us in a dead calm, which lasted
a couple of days, when another gale of three days drove us in the
direction we wanted to go, and dropped us off Torquay in the morning
of what seemed a delicious spring day, all sunshine and south wind. We
hailed a fishing boat and went ashore. We had left a land buried in
snow and ice, and we reached one in early spring, though it was still
January, the gorse in odorous blossoming, and in the hedgerows the
early wild flowers in profusion. But we learned, on landing, that the
recent gales had strewn the shores of England with wrecks, with great
loss of life. It had been one of those terrible winters which have
helped make the British sailor the sea dog he is.

I took lodgings in Charles Street, Middlesex Hospital, near Wehnert,
and worked hard. I had brought my "Bed of Ferns," a large study from
nature on Saranac Lake, and one or two smaller studies. I had visits
from Dante Rossetti, Leighto