hough; for, habituated as I now was
to the ways of sailor-folk, it made little difference to me whether I
slept by day or night so long as I had a favourable opportunity for a
comfortable caulk. Indeed, my eyes might have been `scorched out,' as
the saying is, without awaking me.

It was something else that aroused me,--an unaccustomed sound which I
had not heard since I left home and ran away to sea.

It was the cooing of doves in the distance.

"Roo-coo-coo! Roo-coo-coo! Coo-coo! Roo-c-o-o!"

I heard it as plainly as possible, just as the plaintive sound used to
catch my ear from the wood at the back of the vicarage garden in the old
times, when I loved to listen to the bird's love call--those old times
that seemed so far off in the perspective of the past, and yet were only
two years at most agone!

Why, I must be dreaming, I thought.

But, no; there came the soft, sweet cooing of the doves again.

"Roo-coo-coo! Roo-coo-coo! Coo-coo! Roo-c-o-o!"

Thoroughly roused at last, I jumped out of the bunk I occupied next
Hiram, who was still fast asleep, with a lot of the other sailors round
him snoring in the fo'c's'le; and rubbing my eyes with both knuckles, to
further convince myself of being wide awake, I crawled out from the
fore-hatchway on to the open deck.

But, almost as soon as I stepped on my feet, I was startled, for all the
starboard side, which was higher than the other, from the list the ship
had to port, was covered, where the rain had not washed it away, with a
thick deposit of brown, sandy loam, like snuff; while the scuppers aft,
where everything had been washed by the deluge that had descended on the
decks, were choked up with a muddy mass of the same stuff, forming a big
heap over a foot high. I could see, too, that the snuffy dust had
penetrated everywhere, hanging on the ropes, and in places where the
rain had not wetted it, like powdery snow, although of a very different
colour.

Recollecting the earthquake of the previous evening, and all that I had
heard and read of similar phenomena, I ascribed this brown, dusty
deposit to some volcanic eruption in the near neighbourhood.

This, I thought, likewise, was probably the cause, as well, of the
unaccountable darkness that enveloped the ship at the time we
experienced the shock; but, just then, I caught, a sight of the land
over the lee bulwarks, and every other consideration was banished by
this outlook on the strange scene amidst wh