hrill of exultation I
experienced at the reflection that man, puny as is his strength compared
with the mighty forces of Nature, has been endowed by his Creator with
an intellect capable of devising and framing a structure so subtly
moulded and so strongly put together, that it is able to face and
triumphantly survive such a mad fury of wind and sea as then raged
around me.

Throughout the greater part of that night the gale continued to blow
with unabated fury; but about three o'clock on the following morning a
rapid rise of the barometer commenced, and some two hours later a single
star twinkling brightly for a moment through a small rift in the
hitherto unbroken cloud-rack overhead gave welcome assurance that the
worst of the weather was now over--an assurance which was shortly
afterward strengthened by a slight but unmistakable decrease in the
violence of the wind. Then a few more stars beamed mildly down upon us
for brief but lengthening intervals; and finally, about half an hour
before the time of sunrise, the great pall of cloud broke up into
squadrons of tattered streamers speeding swiftly athwart the sky, which,
away down in the eastern quarter, was rapidly paling before the dawn.
Anon the pallor became tinged with a chilly hue of yellow, against which
the mountainous sea reared itself in vast sharply defined ridges of
blackest indigo, paling, as the eye travelled round the horizon toward
the western quarter, into a deep blue-grey, capped with lofty, curling
crests of pallid foam. Quickly the cold yellow along the eastern
horizon became flushed with streaks of angry red; the flying squadrons
of rent grey cloud became fringed along their lower edges with dyes of
purple and crimson; and presently the upper rim of the sun's disc,
copper-hued and fiery, gleamed through the flying rack low down upon the
horizon, flashing a cheerless ray of angry orange across the mountain
waste of waters, changing it into a heaving, turbulent surface of sickly
olive-green.

It was as dreary, cheerless a sunrise, I think, as I had ever seen. The
air, still full of spindrift, was, despite our position only a few
degrees north of the Line, chill enough to set one shuddering; the
maindeck was all awash with the water that flew incessantly over the
weather-bow and poured aft with the heaving of the ship, breaking into
miniature cascades among the booms lashed in the waist, and over the
lengths of cable stretched along the decks from