AT SEA 269 



sailors become an imaginative and superstitious 

 race ; it is the reaction from this narrow horizon in 

 which they are pent, — this ring of fate surrounds 

 and oppresses them. They escape by invoking the 

 aid of the supernatural. In the sea itself there is 

 far less to stimulate the imagination than in the 

 varied forms and colors of the land. How cold, 

 how merciless, how elemental it looks! 



The only things that look familiar at sea are the 

 clouds. These are messengers from home, and how 

 weary and disconsolate they appear, stretching out 

 along the horizon, as if looking for a hill or moun- 

 tain-top to rest upon, — nothing to hold them up, 

 — a roof without walls, a span without piers. One 

 gets the impression that they are grown faint, and 

 must presently, if they reach much farther, fall into 

 the sea. But when the rain came, it seemed like 

 mockery or irony on the part of the clouds. Did 

 one vaguely believe, then, that the clouds would 

 respect the sea, and withhold their needless rain? 

 No, they treated it as if it were a mill-pond, or 

 a spring-run, too insignificant to make any excep- 

 tions to. 



One bright Sunday, when the surface of the sea 

 was like glass, a long chain of cloud- mountains lay 

 to the south of us all day, while the rest of the sky 

 was clear. How they glowed in the strong sun- 

 light, their summits shining like a bouquet of full 

 moons, and making a broad, white, or golden path 

 upon the water ! They came out of the southwest, 

 an endless procession of them, and tapered away in 



