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of a rope and saved myself, made my heart come in my mouth; and what with this, and the turmoil of the elements around me as I clung to the yard, with the deck of the ship so small and far-away below, and saw the immense area of the swelling sea as far as the eye could reach--now chopped up into short rolling waves, crowned with foam, almost in an instant, and the black cloud-covered dome of the heavens that was almost as dark as at midnight--I could not help thinking of the grandeur of the works of God, and the insignificance of man and his pigmy attempts to master the elements. For, beyond the quick sharp puffs of wind that came with the squalls of rain from almost every point of the compass in succession, the downpour which descended from the overcast sky was accompanied with terrible ear- splitting peals of thunder. This seemed to rattle and roll almost immediately above our heads, as if the overhanging black vault was about to burst open every moment; while dazzling forked flashes of bluish lightning zigzagged across the horizon from the zenith, first blinding our eyes with its brilliancy for a second and then making the darkness all around the darker as the vivid glare vanished and the accompanying thunderbolt sank into the sea--providentially far off to leeward, where the full force of the tropical storm was spent, and not near our vessel. The sight was an awful and magnificent one to me suspended there in mid- air, as it were; but I confess I was not sorry when, presently, the mizzen-topgallant was snugly stowed, with the gaskets put round it, and I was able to get down to the more substantial deck below, where I was not quite so close to the cloud war going on above! When I reached the poop, as the Silver Queen was now stripped of her superfluous canvas and ready for anything that might happen should the squalls last, Mr Mackay seeing that I was wet through told me that I might go down and change my clothes. This I gratefully did, feeling all the better on getting into a dry suit, over which I took the precaution before coming out of the deck-house again of rigging my waterproof and a tarpaulin hat; for the rain was still coming down in a regular deluge, "as if the sluice-valve of the water tank above had somehow or other jammed foul, so that the water couldn't be turned off for a while"--this being Tom Jerrold's explanation of it. Feeling chilled from the damp after the great heat of the morning, as
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