uity of Chief Engineer Tucker he now
occupies a tin house with a wonderful mansard roof, from which he
issues every afternoon for an aerial constitutional, giving us a fright
occasionally with a flight over far a-sea, but always returning safely
enough to his new diggings.

That Tuesday morning the sun rose fiery red out of the steaming Guinea
jungles to the east of us, across its lower half two narrow black bars
sinister. It looked as if it had blood in its eye, while the still,
heavy, brooding air felt to be ominous of evil, harboring devilment of
some sort. All the mess were cross-grained, silent, or irritable,
raw-edged for the first time, for a better lot of fellows one could not
ask to ship with. Nor throughout the day did weather conditions or
tempers improve. All day long the sky was heavily overcast with dense,
low-hanging, dark gray clouds, which, while wholly obscuring the sun,
seemed to focus its rays upon us like a vast burning-glass; wherefore
it was expedient for the two pajama-clad passengers to keep well within
the shelter of the bridge-deck awning. Toward sunset, a dense black
wall of cloud settled upon the western horizon, aft of us. But
suddenly, just at the moment the sun must have been descending below
the horizon to the south of it, the black wall of cloud slowly parted,
and the opening so made widened until it became an enormous oval,
reaching from horizon half-way to zenith, framing a scene of astounding
beauty and grandeur. Range after range of cloud crests that looked
like mountain folds rose one above another, with the appearance of vast
intervening space between, some of the ranges a most delicate blue or
pink, some opalescent, some gloriously gilded, while behind the
farthest and tallest range, at what seemed an inconceivably remote
distance, but in a perspective entirely harmonious with the foreground,
appeared the sky itself, a soft luminous straw-yellow in color, flecked
thickly over with tiny snow-white cloudlets. It was like a glimpse
into another and more beautiful world than ours--the actual celestial
world.

But, whether or not ominous of our future, we were permitted no more
than a brief glimpse of it, for presently the pall of black cloud fell
like a vast drop curtain and shut it from our sight. Then night came
down upon us, black, starless, forbidding, although in the absence of
any fall of the barometer nothing more than a downpour of rain was
expected.

But shortly