232 WINTER SUNSHINE 



stem to stern, she recovers, she breaks the gripe of 

 her antagonist, and, rising up, shakes the sea from 

 her with a kind of gleeful wrath; I hear the tor 

 rents of water rush along the lower decks, and, find 

 ing a means of escape, pour back into the sea, glad 

 to get away on any terms, and I say, "Noble ship! 

 you are indeed a god ! " 



I wanted to see a first-class storm at sea, and per 

 haps ought to be satisfied with the heavy blow or 

 hurricane we had when off ' Sable Island, but I con 

 fess I was not, though, by the lying-to of the vessel 

 and the frequent soundings, it was evident there 

 was danger about. A dense fog uprose, which did 

 not drift like a land fog, but was as immovable as 

 iron; it was like a spell, a misty enchantment; and 

 out of this fog came the wind, a steady, booming 

 blast, that smote the ship over on her side and held 

 her there, and howled in the rigging like a chorus of 

 fiends. The waves did not know which way to 

 flee; they were heaped up and then scattered in a 

 twinkling. I thought of the terrible line of one of 

 our poets : 



" The spasm of the sky and the shatter of the sea." 

 The sea looked wrinkled and old and oh, so pitiless ! 

 I had stood long before Turner's " Shipwreck " in 

 the National Gallery in London, and this sea re 

 called his, and I appreciated more than ever the 

 artist's great powers. 



These storms, it appears, are rotary in their wild 

 dance and promenade up and down the seas. " Look 

 the wind squarely in the teeth," said an ex-sea- 



