colors; then came the fog again,
driving hurriedly by, as if impatient to go somewhere and enraged at the
obstacle. It seemed to have a vast inorganic life of its own, a volition
and a whim. It drew itself across the horizon like a curtain; then
advanced in trampling armies up the bay; then marched in masses
northward; then suddenly grew thin, and showed great spaces of sunlight;
then drifted across the low islands, like long tufts of wool; then
rolled itself away toward the horizon; then closed in again, pitiless
and gray.

Suddenly something vast towered amid the mist above them. It was the
French war-ship returned to her anchorage once more, and seeming in that
dim atmosphere to be something spectral and strange that had taken form
out of the elements. The muzzles of great guns rose tier above tier,
along her side; great boats hung one above another, on successive pairs
of davits, at her stern. So high was her hull, that the topmost boat and
the topmost gun appeared to be suspended in middle air; and yet this
was but the beginning of her altitude. Above these were the heavy masts,
seen dimly through the mist; between these were spread eight dark lines
of sailors' clothes, which, with the massive yards above, looked
like part of some ponderous framework built to reach the sky. This
prolongation of the whole dark mass toward the heavens had a portentous
look to those who gazed from below; and when the denser fog sometimes
furled itself away from the topgallant masts, hitherto invisible, and
showed them rising loftier yet, and the tricolor at the mizzen-mast-head
looking down as if from the zenith, then they all seemed to appertain
to something of more than human workmanship; a hundred wild tales of
phantom vessels came up to the imagination, and it was as if that one
gigantic structure were expanding to fill all space from sky to sea.

They were swept past it; the fog closed in; it was necessary to land
near the Fort, and proceed on foot. They walked across the rough
peninsula, while the mist began to disperse again, and they were buoyant
with expectation. As they toiled onward, the fog suddenly met them at
the turn of a lane where it had awaited them, like an enemy. As they
passed into those gray and impalpable arms, the whole world changed
again.

They walked toward the sound of the sea. As they approached it, the dull
hue that lay upon it resembled that of the leaden sky. The two elements
could hardly be distingu