as sombre and as frightening as
they were themselves in their aspect and their annals.

They come unbidden,

and when they will come, the mind is led by them as birds are said to be
lured by the serpent's eye. A tune, a breath of sighing air, an odour--and
there goes the foolish ghost back to Flanders.

Even here, I suppose, in the Atlantic's healthy blue, I am at the mercy of
a coincidence in lime-juice.

-----

[Footnote 4: Divisional Intelligence Report.]

XII

Following a roaster of day, with a slack wind astern covering the deck
forward with showers of cinders like shot, I admired the moonlight
and the sweet night air before I turned in to sleep soundly. I woke
thinking I heard the usual swabbing of decks beginning, but this was
incorrect. It was quite dark, and I began to think with gratitude of
a second innings of sleep; but when I looked at my watch it was after
seven. The din of water outside, mingled with the rushing of a mighty
wind, persuaded me to go to the door. In a few moments the storm was
at its height, the sea shrouded in a thick deluge almost to the ship's
side, and its waves beaten down by the rain into pallid foam-veined
inertia. An ashen grey light was about us, but the clouds of rain veiled
the poop from one's eyes amidships, and the siren trumpeted out its
warnings; while sheet-like lightning flamed through the vapours, and
bursts of deeper thunder than I had ever heard followed hard upon them.
The decks were racing with water from overhead covers and stairways, and
in each lifting of the storm the awning over the sailors' quarters aft
could be seen tearing at its tethers.

This fury soon slackened, and green and blue, pale as yet, returned to
the seas as they leapt away from the bows. Breakfast intervened. Attention
was requested from the storm by the appearance of a new and experimental
kind of ham.

"Yes. What d'ye think of the ham--tinned boneless smoked ham?"

"Well, I like it well enough; but it's boneless. If you take the bone away
from ham, you take away the nature of it."

This ham later on became much esteemed, but the ingenious mind was for
dissembling the fact: "We'd better not give a too enthusiastic report on
it or they'll only give it to the passenger boats" of the same company.

It was blowing still, from the coast of South America. "Smell the mould?"
asked Hosea, and I did; a strange frightening fragrance, of the earth
earthy, a heavy and swooning sme