rest, dearest
girl--how can I dare to call you so? Let me, therefore, rush for comfort
into other thoughts; and tell you at once of the fearful dangers we have
now mercifully escaped; for the Samarang lies like a log in this
friendly port, dismasted, and next to a wreck.

"I proceed to show you about it; perhaps I shall be tedious--but I do it
as a little rest, my own soul's love, from anxious, earnest,
heart-distracting prayers continually, continually, that the sorrow
which I spoke of be not true. Sometimes, a light breaks in, and I
rejoice in the most sanguine hope: at others, gloom--

"But a truce to all this, I say. Here shall follow didactically the
cause why the good ship Samarang is not by this time in the Docks.

"We were lying somewhere about the tropical belt, Capricorn you know,
(O, those tender lessons in geography, my Emmy!) quite becalmed; the sea
like glass, and the sky like brass, and the air in a most stagnant heat:
our good ship motionless, dead in a dead blue sea it was

'Idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.'

"The sails were hanging loosely in the shrouds: every one set, from
sky-scraper to stud-sail, in hopes to catch a breath of wind. My
fellow-passengers and the crew, almost melted, were lying about, as weak
as parboiled eels: it was high-noon, all things silent and subdued by
that intolerable blaze; for the vertical sun, over our multiplied
awnings and umbrellas, burnt us up, fierce as a furnace.

"I was leaning over the gangway, looking wistfully at the cool, clear,
deep sea, wherefrom the sailors were trying to persuade a shark to come
on board us, when, all at once, in the south-east quarter, I noticed a
little round black cloud, thrown up from the horizon like a
cricket-ball. As any thing is attractive in such sameness as perpetual
sea and sky, my discovery was soon made known, and among the first to
our captain.

"Calling for his Dolland, and bidding his second lieutenant run quick to
the cabin and look at the barometer, he viewed the little cloud in
evident anxiety, and shook his head with a solemn air: more than one
light-hearted woman thinking he was quizzing them.

"Up came Lieutenant Joyce, looking as if he had seen a ghost in the
cabin.

"'The mercury, sir, is falling just as rapidly as it would rise if you
plunged it into boiling water: an inch a minute or so!"

"Our captain saw the danger instantly, and, brave as Trueman is, I never
saw a man look paler.

"To d