ter motion which
they found beyond the Banks. They now talked of the heat of the first
days out, and how much they had suffered; some who had passed the night
on board before sailing tried to impart a sense of their misery in
trying to sleep.

A day or two later a storm struck the ship, and the sailors stretched
canvas along the weather promenade and put up a sheathing of boards
across the bow end to keep off the rain. Yet a day or two more and the
sea had fallen again and there was dancing on the widest space of the
lee promenade.

The little events of the sea outside the steamer offered themselves in
their poor variety. Once a ship in the offing, with all its square sails
set, lifted them like three white towers from the deep. On the rim of
the ocean the length of some westward liner blocked itself out against
the horizon, and swiftly trailed its smoke out of sight. A few tramp
steamers, lounging and lunging through the trough of the sea, were
overtaken and left behind; an old brigantine passed so close that her
rusty iron sides showed plain, and one could discern the faces of the
people on board.

The steamer was oftenest without the sign of any life beyond her. One
day a small bird beat the air with its little wings, under the roof of
the promenade, and then flittered from sight over the surface, of the
waste; a school of porpoises, stiff and wooden in their rise, plunged
clumsily from wave to wave. The deep itself had sometimes the unreality,
the artificiality of the canvas sea of the theatre. Commonly it was
livid and cold in color; but there was a morning when it was delicately
misted, and where the mist left it clear, it was blue and exquisitely
iridescent under the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by
the falling spray. These were rare moments; mostly, when it was not like
painted canvas, is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smooth
cleavage. Where it met the sky it lay flat and motionless, or in the
rougher weather carved itself along the horizon in successions of
surges.

If the sun rose clear, it was overcast in a few hours; then the clouds
broke and let a little sunshine through, to close again before the dim
evening thickened over the waters. Sometimes the moon looked through the
ragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemed to shine till morning, and
shook a path of quicksilver from the horizon to the ship. Through every
change, after she had left the fog behind, the steamer dro