n some of her wild lee rolls she
careened until her topgallant rail was awash and it became impossible to
maintain one's footing on the deck without holding on to something, she
looked well up into the wind, and rode the boiling fury of the sea as
buoyantly as a cork. Her foredeck, it is true, from the knight-heads to
well abaft the galley, was streaming with the water that incessantly
poured over her weather-bow in a torrent of spray; but abaft that the
decks would have been dry but for the drenching spindrift.

The darkness fell upon us with a suddenness that was almost startling.
I had been for some time--ever since we had hove-to, _in fact_--narrowly
watching the ship to see how she met the seas; but at length, finding
that she was taking care of herself, I ordered Joe to lash the wheel,
and gave him permission to go below and join the others at supper in the
forecastle. Before finally releasing him, however, and assuming my
solitary watch, I thought I would have another look at the mercury. I
accordingly went below into the saloon, where the lamps were already
lighted, glanced at the barometer and saw that the mercury was now
stationary, chatted for a minute or two with the occupants of the
apartment, and then went on deck again. When I left the deck a few
minutes before, the horizon and the forms of the flying clouds were
clearly distinguishable; but now, when I returned to it again, the
blackness of impenetrable darkness was all round about me, relieved only
by the ghostly light of the pale seafire in the foaming wave-crests, and
in the tiny stars of phosphorescent light that went careering to leeward
across the deck with every lee roll of the ship. It was a weird and
awe-inspiring sensation to stand there in the blackness upon the wildly
heaving deck, and watch the irresistible, menacing onrush upon the ship
of those furious mountain surges, capped with ghostly green fire, with
the deafening shriek and din of the gale in the unseen rigging overhead
resounding in one's ears--a sensation well calculated to bring home to a
man his own nothingness in presence of the power and majesty of Him Who
causeth the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth; Who maketh
lightnings for the rain; Who bringeth forth the wind out of His
treasuries; Who hath His way in the whirlwind and the storm; Who holdeth
the sea in the hollow of His hand. And this feeling was in nowise
lessened--nay, it was rather intensified--by the t