AT SEA 273 



changing their forms, new chasms opening, new 

 pinnacles rising: but these appearances were easily 

 accounted for by the credulous; the ice mountains 

 were rolling over, or splitting asunder. One of the 

 rarest things in the average cultivated man or 

 woman is the capacity to receive and weigh evidence 

 touching any natural phenomenon, especially at sea. 

 If the captain had deliberately said that the shift- 

 ing forms there on the horizon were only a school 

 of whales playing at leap-frog, all the women and 

 half the men among the passengers would have 

 believed him. 



In going to England in early May, we encoun- 

 tered the fine weather, the warmth and the sun- 

 shine as of June, that had been "central" over the 

 British Islands for a week or more, five or six 

 hundred miles from shore. We had come up from 

 lower latitudes, and it was as if we had ascended 

 a hill and found summer at the top, while a cold, 

 backward spring yet lingered in the valley. But 

 on our return in early August, the positions of 

 spring and summer were reversed. Scotland was 

 cold and rainy, and for several days at sea you 

 could in the distance hardly tell the sea from the 

 sky, all was so gray and misty. In mid- Atlantic 

 we ran into the American climate. The great con- 

 tinent, basking there in the western sun, and glow- 

 ing with midsummer heat, made itself felt to the 

 centre of this briny void. The sea detached itself 

 sharply from the sky, and became like a shield of 

 burnished steel, which the sky surrounded like a 



