e wind followed
us, and at last gained a speed greater than our own; then it shifted
and came down from the northwest. It was the wind that swept from
Siberia, and Kamschatka's grim peninsula pointed us out. The smoke
from our funnels blew black and dense away southeast, and did not
change more than a point or two for a week. The Pacific began to look
like the North Atlantic. There came a "chill out of a cloud" as in
the poetic case of Annabel Lee. There had been, during our tropical
experience, some outcries for the favor of a few chills, but now they
were like the typhoons. When it was found that they might be had we
did not want them. After all, warm weather was not so bad, and the
chills that were in the wind that whistled from Siberia were rather
objectionable. It was singular to call for one, two, three blankets,
and then hunt up overcoats. White trousers disappeared two or three
days after the white coats. Straw hats were called for by the wind. One
white cap on an officer's head responded alone to the swarm of white
caps on the water. The roll of the waves impeded our great northern
circle. We could have made it, but we should have had to roll with
the waves. We got no higher than 45 degrees. We had our two Thursdays,
and thought of the fact that on the mystical meridian 180, where three
days get mixed up in one! The Pacific Ocean, from pole to pole, so free
on the line where the dispute as to the day it is, goes on forever,
that only one small island is subject to the witchery of mathematics,
and the proof in commonplace transactions unmixed with the skies that
whatever may be the matter with the sun--the earth do move, is round,
do roll over, and does not spill off the sea in doing so. At last came
shrill head winds, and as we added fifteen miles an hour to this speed,
the harp strings in the rigging were touched with weird music, and we
filled our lungs consciously and conscientiously with American air,
experiencing one of the old sensations, better than anything new.

It was figured out that we were within a thousand miles of the
continent, and were getting home. When one has been to the Philippines,
what's a thousand miles or two! "Hello, Captain Seabury! It is only
about a thousand miles right ahead to the land. You know what land
it is, don't you? Well, now, you may break the shaft or burst the
boilers, fling the ship to the sperm whales, like the one that was
the only living thing we saw since Japan ente