Stories by English Authors: the Sea | Page 2

a minute. But it is true, nevertheless, that others besides me gaped at
the wonderful gushings of hot purple,--arrested whirlpools of crimson
haze, they looked,--in the heart of which the orb sat rayless, flooding
the sea with blood under him, so magnificently fell was the hue, and
flushing the sky with twenty dyes of gold and orange, till, in the far east,
the radiance fainted into the delicacy of pale amber.
"Yon's a sunset," said Captain Matthews, a North of England man, to
me, "to make a fellow think of the last day."
"I'm looking at it, sir," said I, "as though I had never seen a sunset

before. That's the oddest part of it, to my mind. There's fire enough
there to eat a gale up. How should a cat's-paw crawl then?" And I softly
whistled, while he wetted his finger and held it up; but to no purpose;
the draught was all between the rails, and they blew forward and aft
with every swing of the sails.
When the dusk came along, the silence upon the sea was something to
put all sorts of moods into a man. The sky was a hovering velvet stretch
of stars, with a young moon lying curled among them, and winkings of
delicate violet sheet-lightning down in the southwest, as though some
gigantic-tinted lantern, passing, flung its light upon the dark blue
obscure there. The captain went below, after a long, impatient look
round, and I overhung the rail, peering into the water alongside, or
sending my gaze into the frightful distance, where the low-lying stars
hung. With every soft dip of the ship's side to the slant of the dark folds,
there shot forth puffs of cloudy phosphor, intermixed with a sparkling
of sharper fires now and again, blue, yellow, and green, like worms of
flame striking out of their cocoons of misty radiance. The noise of the
canvas on high resembled the stirring of pinions, and the cheep of a
block, the grind of a parrel, helped the illusion, as though the sounds
were the voices of huge birds restlessly beating their pinions aloft.
Presently the man at the wheel startled me with an observation. I went
to him, and he pointed upward with a long, shadowy arm. I looked, and
saw a corposant, as it is called at sea,--a St. Elmo's fire,--burning at the
end of the crossjack-yard. The yard lay square, and the polished sea
beneath gave back the reflection so clearly that the mystic fire lay like a
huge glow-worm on the black mirror.
"There should be wind not far off," said the helmsman, in a subdued
voice; for few sailors can see one of these lights without a stirring of
their superstitious instincts, and this particular exhalation hung close to
us.
"I hope so," said I, "though I don't know where it's to come from."
As I spoke, the light vanished. I ran my eye over the yards, expecting
its reappearance; but it returned no more, and the sails rose pale and
phantom-like to the stars. I was in an odd humour, and this was an
apparition not to brighten one up. Of course one knows all about these
maritime corpse-candles, and can explain their nature; but nevertheless
the sudden kindling of them upon the darkness of the night, in the dead

hush of the calm or amid the fury of the shrieking hurricane, produces
feelings which there is nothing in science to resolve. I could have
laughed to find myself sending a half-awed look aloft, as if I expected
to see some visionary hand at work upon another one these graveyard
illuminations-with a stealing out of some large, sad face to the
melancholy glow; but I returned to the side very pensive for all that,
and there stood watching the fiery outline of a shark subtly sneaking
close to the surface (insomuch that the wake of its fin slipped away in
little coils of green flame) toward the ship's bows.
Half an hour later the dark curl of a light air of wind shattered the
starlight in the sea, and our canvas fell asleep. I called to the watch to
trim sail, and in a few moments the decks were busy with the figures of
men pulling and hauling and surging out at the ropes in sulky,
slumberous growlings. The captain arrived.
"Little worth having in this, I fear," said he. "But make the most of
it--make the most of it. Get the foretopmast stunsail run up. If she
creeps but a league, it is a league to the good."
The sail was sleepily set. Humbugging about with stunsails to the
cat's-paws little pleased the men, especially at night. For three days
they had been boxhauling the yards about to no purpose, and it was
sickening work