they thus saw them coming into the jaws,
as they thought, of certain destruction. Before night, however, they
were to change their opinions in respect to the insanity of their foes.
The Greeks pushed boldly on into the midst of the Persian fleet, where
they were soon surrounded. They then formed themselves into a circle,
with the prows of the vessels outward, and the sterns toward the center
within, and fought in this manner with the utmost desperation all the
day. With the night a storm came on, or, rather, a series of
thunder-showers and gusts of wind, so severe that both fleets were glad
to retire from the scene of contest. The Persians went back toward the
east, the Greeks to the westward, toward Thermopylae--each party busy in
repairing their wrecks, taking care of their wounded, and saving their
vessels from the tempest. It was a dreadful night. The Persians,
particularly, spent it in the midst of scenes of horror. The wind and
the current, it seems, set outward, toward the sea, and carried the
masses and fragments of the wrecked vessels, and the swollen and ghastly
bodies of the dead, in among the Persian fleet, and so choked up the
surface of the water that the oars became entangled and useless. The
whole mass of seamen in the Persian fleet, during this terrible night,
were panic-stricken and filled with horror. The wind, the perpetual
thunder, the concussions of the vessels with the wrecks and with one
another, and the heavy shocks of the seas, kept them in continual
alarm; and the black and inscrutable darkness was rendered the more
dreadful, while it prevailed, by the hideous spectacle which, at every
flash of lightning, glared brilliantly upon every eye from the wide
surface of the sea. The shouts and cries of officers vociferating
orders, of wounded men writhing in agony, of watchmen and sentinels in
fear of collisions, mingled with the howling wind and roaring seas,
created a scene of indescribable terror and confusion.

The violence of the sudden gale was still greater further out at sea,
and the detachment of ships which had been sent around Euboea was wholly
dispersed and destroyed by it.

The storm was, however, after all, only a series of summer evening
showers, such as to the inhabitants of peaceful dwellings on the land
have no terror, but only come to clear the sultry atmosphere in the
night, and in the morning are gone. When the sun rose, accordingly, upon
the Greeks and Persians on the morning a