orthward and westward all that day, shaping a
fresh course for Morant Point at sunset that evening. The sun went down
in a heavy bank of clouds that had been gathering on the western horizon
all the afternoon and slowly working up against the wind,--an almost
certain precursor of a thunderstorm,--and as the dusk closed down upon
us the wind began to grow steadily lighter, until by the end of the
first dog-watch the air was so scant as to barely give us steerage-way.
The night closed down as dark as a wolf's mouth--so dark, indeed, that,
standing at the taffrail, I could only barely, and with the utmost
difficulty, trace the position of the main rigging against the intense
blackness of the sky. As for the _Dolores_, we lost sight of her
altogether, and could only determine her position by the dim, uncertain
haze of light that faintly streamed above her high bulwarks from the
skylight of her saloon, or by the momentary gleam of a lantern passing
along her decks and blinking intermittently through her open ports.
This intense darkness lasted only about half an hour, however, when
sheet-lightning began to flicker softly low down upon the western
horizon, causing the image of the ship--now some two miles astern of
us--to stand out for an instant like a cunningly wrought model in
luminous bronze against the ebony blackness of the sky behind her.

With the setting-in of the lightning the last faint breathing of the
wind died away altogether, leaving us and the Spaniard to box the
compass in the midst of a glassy calm, the sweltering heat of which was
but partially relieved by the flapping of our big mainsail as the
schooner heaved languidly upon the low swell that came creeping down
upon us from the north-east. The night seemed preternaturally still,
the silence which enveloped us being so profound that the noises of the
ship--the occasional heavy flap of her canvas, accompanied by a rain-
like pattering of reef-points; the creak of the jaws of the mainboom or
of the gaff overhead on the mast; the jerk of the mainsheet tautening
out suddenly to the heave of the schooner; the kicking of the rudder,
and the gurgling swirl of water about it and along the bends--only
served to emphasise while they broke in upon it with an irritating
harshness altogether disproportionate to their volume. So intense was
the silence _outside_ the ship that one seemed constrained to listen
intently for some sound, some startling cry, to come floati