females walked apart,
leaving the young Commander to the uninterrupted discharge of his duty.
But Wilder, so far from deeming it necessary to lend his attention to so
ordinary a service, the moment after he had spoken, seemed perfectly
unconscious that the mandate had issued from his mouth. He stood on the
precise spot where the view of the ocean and the heavens had first caught
his eye, and his gaze still continued fastened on the aspect of the two
elements. His look was always in the direction of the wind, which, though
far from a gale, often fell upon the sails of the ship in heavy and sullen
puffs. After a long and anxious examination, the young mariner muttered
his thoughts to himself, and commenced pacing the deck with rapid
footsteps. Still he would make sudden and short pauses, and again rivet
his gaze on the point of the compass whence the blasts came sweeping
across the waste of waters; as though he distrusted the weather, and would
fain cause his keen glance to penetrate the gloom of night, in order to
relieve some painful doubts. At length his step became arrested, in one of
those quick turns that he made at each end of his narrow walk. Mrs Wyllys
and Gertrude stood nigh, and were enabled to read something of the anxious
character of his countenance, as his eye became suddenly fastened on a
distant point of the ocean, though in a quarter exactly opposite to that
whither his former looks had been directed.

"Do you so much distrust the weather?" asked the governess, when she
thought his examination had endured long enough to become ominous of evil.

"One looks not to leeward for the signs of the weather, in a breeze like
this," was the answer.

"What see you, then, to fasten your eye on thus intently?"

Wilder slowly raised his arm, and was about to point with his finger,
when the limb suddenly fell again.

"It was delusion!" he muttered, turning quickly on his heel, and pacing
the deck still more rapidly than ever.

His companions watched the extraordinary, and apparently unconscious,
movements of the young Commander, with amazement, and not without a little
secret dismay. Their own looks wandered over the expanse of troubled water
to leeward, but nowhere could they see more than the tossing element,
capped with those ridges of garish foam which served only to make the
chilling waste more dreary and imposing.

"We see nothing," said Gertrude, when Wilder again stopped in his walk,
and once more gazed