quate interest to the occasion.
Miss Brisbane did, indeed, stare at her father in her dreamy, abstracted
way a moment, and then got up, and, going to the open window, began to
arrange the curtains, as if relinquishing whatever problem there was to
the superior acumen of the masculine mind.

I think I said that it looked as if there had been a cyclone somewhere,
and if there had we should in all probability get the accounts of it
soon enough.

"But, young man," replied the Judge, with his majesterial emphasis,
"cyclones do not extend from the fiftieth degree of north latitude to
the fortieth degree of south latitude, and vessels are due at San
Francisco from Melbourne and Japan."

"What, then, other than a storm at sea could have caused a detention of
all these vessels?" I asked, and I must have unwittingly betrayed in the
tone of my voice, or the expression of my face, that considerate
superciliousness with which youth regards the serious notions of mature
philosophers, for the Judge, putting his gold spectacles upon his nose,
and regarding me over the top of them a moment, said rather severely:

"Other than the known and regular phenomena of this planet do not
interest young men. If I could answer your question there would be no
special interest in the matter."

I mention these trivial incidents because, insignificant as they may
seem, they were the first ripples of that disaster which was soon enough
to overwhelm us all, and to show you what were the only premonitions the
world had of the events which were to follow.

On June 26, the subject did not occur to me. A hundred other things of
far more immediate consequence to me occupied my attention. A young man
who is preparing to get married is not apt to take somber views of
anything. Nor is he very apt to allow the contumacy of age in his
prospective father-in-law to aggravate him. It was a pardonable freak, I
thought, in a man who had retired in most respects from the active
world, to dogmatize a little about that world now that he judged it
through his favorite evening paper. When, therefore, on the night of the
26th, while at the tea-table, the Judge broke out again about the
meteorological wave on the Pacific coast, his daughter Kate and I
exchanged a rapid but furtive glance which said, in the perfect
understanding of lovers, "There comes the old gentleman's new hobby
again, and we can well afford to treat it leniently."

The Judge had the damp evening pa