250 THE JOURNEYMAN. 



" Well/' thought I, " this is the tax I pay for my curi- 

 osity/' I rose and crept softly over the sails to the bows, 

 where I stood, and where, in the singular beauty of the 

 scene, which was of a character as different from that I 

 had lately witnessed as is possible to conceive, I soon 

 lost all sense of every feeling that was not pleasure. 

 The breeze had died into a perfect calm. The heavens 

 were glowing with stars, and the sea, from the smooth- 

 ness of the surface, appeared a second sky, as bright and 

 starry as the other, but with this difference, that all its 

 stars appeared comets. There seemed no line of division 

 at the horizon, which rendered the illusion more striking. 

 The distant hills appeared a chain of dark thundery 

 clouds sleeping in the heavens. In short, the scene was 

 one of the strangest I ever witnessed ; and the thoughts 

 and imaginations which it suggested were of a character 

 as singular. I looked at the boat as it appeared in the 

 dim light of midnight, a dark irregularly-shaped mass ; 

 I gazed on the sky of stars above, and the sky of comets 

 below, and imagined myself in the centre of space, far 

 removed from the earth, and every other world, the 

 solitary inhabitant of a planetary fragment. This 

 illusion, too romantic to be lasting, was dissipated by an 

 incident which convinced me that I had not yet left the 

 world. A crew of south-shore fishermen, either by 

 accident or design, had shot their nets right across those 

 of another boat, and in disentangling them a quarrel en- 

 sued. Our boat lay more than half a mile from the 

 scene of contention, but I could hear, without being par- 

 ticularly attentive, that on the one side there were terrible 

 threats of violence immediate and bloody, and on the 

 other, threats of the still more terrible pains and penalties 

 of the law. In a few minutes, however, the entangled 

 nets were freed, and the roar of .altercation gradually 



