"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.
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