early an hour to sunset. But, heavens! what
a change had taken place in the aspect of the weather during the four
hours or so that I had lain asleep in the stern-sheets of the boat! It
is quite possible that, had I remained awake, I should scarcely have
been aware of more than the mere fact that the sky was steadily assuming
an increasingly sombre and threatening aspect; but, awaking as I did to
the abrupt perception of the change that had been steadily working
itself out during the previous four hours, it is not putting it too
strongly to say that I was startled. For whereas my last conscious
memory of the weather, before succumbing to the blandishments of the
drowsy god, had been merely that of a lowering, overcast sky, that might
portend anything, but probably meant no more than a sharp thunder-
squall, I now awakened to the consciousness that the firmament above
consisted of a vast curtain of frowning, murky, black-grey cloud,
streaked or furrowed in a very remarkable manner from about east-south-
east to west-nor'-west, the lower edges of the clouds presenting a
curious frayed appearance, while the clouds themselves glowed here and
there with patches of lurid, fiery red, as though each bore within its
bosom a fiercely burning furnace, the ruddy light of which shone through
in places. I had never before beheld a sky like it, but its aspect was
sufficiently alarming to convince the veriest tyro in weather-lore that
something quite out of the common was brewing; so I at once awoke the
slumbering crew to inquire whether any of them could read the signs and
tell me what we might expect.

The newly-awakened men yawned, stretched their arms above their heads,
and dragged themselves stiffly up on the thwarts, gazing with looks of
wonder and alarm at the portentous sky that hung above them.

"Well, if we was in the Chinese seas, I should say that a typhoon was
goin' to bust out shortly," observed one of them--a grizzled, mahogany-
visaged old salt, who had seen service all over the world. "But," he
continued, "they don't have typhoons in the Atlantic, not as ever I've
heard say."

"No, they don't have typhoons here, but they has hurricanes, which I
take to mean pretty much the same thing," remarked another.

"You are right, Tom," said I, thus put upon the scent, as it were, "a
Chinese typhoon and a West Indian hurricane are the same thing under
different names. A third name for them is `cyclone'; and as this
threa