ve, to find some place of rest; and the mainsail, smoky
like the air, but cutting the smoky air with a sharp plane, was such a
resting place for the vision. This sail and the reeky smokestack
beyond, and the great near billows that emerged from time to time out
of the gray obscurity--these seemed to save the universe from chaos. On
such a day the imagination is released from bounds, individuality is
lost, and space becomes absolute--the soul touches the poles of the
infinite and the unconditioned.

I do not pretend that such emotions filled the breasts of all the
twenty passengers on deck that day. One man was a little seasick, and
after every great rushing plunge of the steamer from a billow summit
into a sea valley he vented his irritation by wishing that he had there
some of the poets that--here he paused and gasped as the ship balanced
itself on another crest preparatory to another shoot down the flank of
a swell, while the screw, thrown clean out of the water, rattled wildly
in the unresisting air and made the ship quiver in every timber--some
of those poets, he resumed with bitterer indignation, that sing about
the loveliness of the briny deep and the deep blue--but here an errant
swell hit the vessel a tremendous blow on the broadside, making her
roll heavily to starboard, and bringing up through the skylights sounds
of breaking goblets thrown from the sideboards in the saloon below,
while the passenger who hated marine poetry was capsized from his
steamer chair and landed sprawling on the deck. A small group of young
people on the forward part of the upper deck were passing the day in
watching the swells and forecasting the effect of each upon the
steamer, rejoicing in the rush upward followed by the sudden falling
downward, much as children enjoy the flying far aloft in a swing or on
a teetering see-saw, to be frightened by the descent. Some of the young
ladies had books open in their laps, but the pretense that they had
come on deck to read was a self-deluding hypocrisy. They had left their
elderly relatives safely ensconced in staterooms below, and had worked
their way up to the deck with much care and climbing and with many
lurches and much grievous staggering, not for the purpose of reading,
but to enjoy the society of other young women, and of such young men as
could sit on deck. When did a young lady ever read on an ocean steamer,
the one place where the numerical odds are reversed and there are
always fo