this way afore," he would say, addressing the officer
of the watch. "Never caught it this way afore. Somebody's brought bad
luck aboard, or we should'nt have such weather as this." Then he would
disappear into the cabin and ponder over his chart, trying to work out
the ship's position. But a strong current and the high wind, both
setting in one direction, had carried him far beyond his reckoning, and
into the vicinity of the Faulkland Islands.

All the light spars had been sent down, and for fifteen days the ship
had labored in the sea under close-reefed topsails and jib, trying to
make weather, but without gaining a mile.

On the sixteenth day the weather cleared up a little and the sun came
out, and an observation was got, which showed that the ship had been
carried into the vicinity before described. For once the sturdy old
whale-killer had got drifted away from his course. But he declared it
was all owing to the sea getting tipsy, the compasses getting tipsy, the
chronometers getting tipsy, and the sun keeping himself rolled up in a
blanket. You could'nt, he said, get a ship to look the wind in the eye
when all the elements were tipsy. He was a lucky mariner who could get
round Cape Horn without being tossed off his feet for a
month--everything seemed to stagger so.

The wind now changed suddenly and blew as fiercely from the opposite
direction, and the cold increased. The ship was at once got on her
course for the straits, her reefs were shook out, and she bowled over
the sea at the rate of nine knots. Still the sky continued black and
cloudy, and the horizon misty and dim. The sea ran high, and broke and
surged, filling the air with a cold, cutting spray, while the ship
labored and strained in every timber.

Have you, my gentle reader, ever seen the broad ocean in an angry mood
on a cold, pitiless winter day, when the horizon was hung with cold,
penetrating mist, when all overhead was black with fleeting clouds, when
the seas broke in their fury and threatened to destroy the frail bark
under your feet, and when rain, hail, and snow alternately swept through
the atmosphere, like showers of keen-pointed arrows--have you, I say,
ever contemplated this sublime and impressive scene without
acknowledging within yourself how omnipotent was God, and how feeble and
insignificant a thing was man?

There is, perhaps, no other place in the world where Nature so combines
all her elements to give an emphatic expression to