terrible catastrophe; but
he was too brave a man and too thorough a seaman to allow aught of this
to appear in either countenance, voice, or manner; nor would he allow
the work to be hurried through with inconsiderate haste; he saw that the
men were startled; and it rested with him to steady them, restore their
confidence, and so prepare them for the coming struggle, whatever its
nature might be.

Meanwhile, the atmospheric phenomena were momentarily assuming a more
and more portentous aspect. The sky deepened in tint from indigo to a
purple black; the sun lost its pallid sickly gleam and hung in the sable
heavens a lurid blood-red ball until it became obscured by heavy masses
of dusky vapour which had gathered imperceptibly in the firmament, and
now seemed to be settling slowly down upon the ship's mast-heads,
rolling and writhing like huge tortured serpents, meanwhile. The
silence--broken though it was by the sounds of preparation on board--
grew even more oppressively intense and death-like than before; and
darkness now came to add new terrors to the scene; not the wholesome
solemn darkness of nightfall, but a weird unearthly gloom which was
neither night nor day, a gloom which descended and encompassed them
stealthily and menacingly, contracting the horizon until nothing could
be seen further than half a mile from the ship, and which still seemed
to be saturated with a pale spectral shimmering light, in the which men
looked in each other's eyes like reanimated corpses. The ocean
presented an aspect no less appalling; at one moment black as the waters
of the Styx, and indistinguishable beyond the distance of a cable's
length, and anon gleaming into view to the very verge of the horizon, a
palpitating sheet of greenish ghastly phosphorescent light.

The canvas was stowed, down to the lower fore and main topsail and the
fore-topmast stay-sail, and the men were about to hurry down from aloft
when Captain Staunton stopped them.

"Clew up and stow the lower topsails as well," he shouted; adding in an
undertone to Mr Bowles, "I don't know _what_ to expect; but it
threatens to be something terrible; and the less canvas we show to it
the better. The stay-sail will be quite as much as we shall want, I
expect."

The topsails were stowed, and the men came down on deck again, evidently
glad to find themselves there once more, and huddling together on the
forecastle like frightened sheep.

The passengers were clustered