AT SEA. 295 



chasms opening, new pinnacles rising ; but these ap- 

 pearances were easily accounted for by the credu- 

 lous ; the ice mountains were rolling over, or split- 

 ting asunder. One of the rarest things in the average 

 cultivated man or woman is the capacity to receive 

 and weigh evidence touching any natural phenome- 

 non, especially at sea. If the captain had deliberately 

 said that the shifting 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 encountered 

 the fine weather, the warmth, and the sunshine as of 

 June that had been " central " over the British Isl- 

 ands 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 re- 

 versed. 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 continent, basking there in the western sun, 

 and glowing 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 

 dome of glass. For four successive nights the sun 



