the surface of the water as forerunners of an approaching breeze, I was
reluctantly compelled to acknowledge to myself that Mendouca was right.
And so it proved; for although the line--or rather belt--of rippling
water not only advanced right up to the ship, giving forth a most
pleasant and refreshing liquid sound as it came, and lapping musically
against the brigantine's sides for a few minutes when it reached her,
but also passed on and traversed the entire visible surface of the
ocean, finally disappearing beyond the southern horizon, the whole
phenomenon was absolutely unaccompanied by the slightest perceptible
movement of the air. This curious disturbance of the ocean's surface
was twice repeated on that same day.

The long, hot, breathless, and wearisome day at length drew to an end,
and still there was no sign of wind; the night passed; another day
dawned; and still we lay, like the craft in Coleridge's _Ancient
Mariner_, "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean." That day
too waxed and waned without the sign of so much as a cat's-paw to revive
our drooping hopes; and although during the succeeding night we were
visited by a terrific thunderstorm, accompanied by a perfect deluge of
rain, during which a few evanescent puffs intermittently filled our
sails, and moved us perhaps a mile nearer Cuba, when day again dawned
there was a further recurrence of the same staring, cloudless sky of
dazzling blue, the same blazing sun, the same breathless atmosphere, and
the same oil-smooth sea. And as these days of calm and stagnation
succeeded each other with relentless persistency, I kept up the custom
of bathing the negroes and thoroughly cleansing the slave-deck, until at
length the poor creatures actually grew fat and merry, so that Mendouca,
despite his fast-growing impatience and irritability at the continued
calm, was obliged to admit that he had never seen a cargo of "black
ivory" in such promising condition before. This, however, was not all;
for while superintending these bathing and scrubbing operations I talked
cheerfully and pleasantly to the fellows, giving them such names as Tom,
Bob, Joe, Snowball, and so on, to which they readily answered, instead
of abusing them and ordering them about with brutal oaths and obscenity,
as was the habit of the crew; and although the poor wretches understood
not a word of what was spoken to them either by the crew or by myself,
yet they readily enough distinguished t