f Jarl, I tried it all by myself;
playing upon my body as upon an instrument; singing, halloing, and
making empty gestures, till my Viking stared hard; and I myself
paused to consider whether I had run crazy or no.

But how account for the Skyeman's gravity? Surely, it was based upon
no philosophic taciturnity; he was nothing of an idealist; an aerial
architect; a constructor of flying buttresses. It was inconceivable,
that his reveries were Manfred-like and exalted, reminiscent of
unutterable deeds, too mysterious even to be indicated by the
remotest of hints. Suppositions all out of the question.

His ruminations were a riddle. I asked him anxiously, whether, in any
part of the world, Savannah, Surat, or Archangel, he had ever a wife
to think of; or children, that he carried so lengthy a phiz. Nowhere
neither. Therefore, as by his own confession he had nothing to think
of but himself, and there was little but honesty in him (having
which, by the way, he may be thought full to the brim), what could I
fall back upon but my original theory: namely, that in repose, his
intellects stepped out, and left his body to itself.

CHAPTER XII
More About Being In An Open Boat

On the third morning, at break of day, I sat at the steering oar, an
hour or two previous having relieved Jarl, now fast asleep. Somehow,
and suddenly, a sense of peril so intense, came over me, that it
could hardly have been aggravated by the completest solitude.

On a ship's deck, the mere feeling of elevation above the water, and
the reach of prospect you command, impart a degree of confidence
which disposes you to exult in your fancied security. But in an open
boat, brought down to the very plane of the sea, this feeling almost
wholly deserts you. Unless the waves, in their gambols, toss you and
your chip upon one of their lordly crests, your sphere of vision is
little larger than it would be at the bottom of a well. At best, your
most extended view in any one direction, at least, is in a high,
slow-rolling sea; when you descend into the dark, misty spaces,
between long and uniform swells. Then, for the moment, it is like
looking up and down in a twilight glade, interminable; where two
dawns, one on each hand, seem struggling through the semi-transparent
tops of the fluid mountains.

But, lingering not long in those silent vales, from watery cliff to
cliff, a sea-chamois, sprang our solitary craft,--a goat among the Alps!

How undulated the