by fierce cat's-paws under a very stormy sky.

We--or, rather, they, for I had hardly had two glimpses of salt
water in my life till then--kept her standing off and on all that
day, while I listened for the first time with the curiosity of my
tender years to the song of the wind in a ship's rigging. The
monotonous and vibrating note was destined to grow into the
intimacy of the heart, pass into blood and bone, accompany the
thoughts and acts of two full decades, remain to haunt like a
reproach the peace of the quiet fireside, and enter into the very
texture of respectable dreams dreamed safely under a roof of
rafters and tiles. The wind was fair, but that day we ran no more.

The thing (I will not call her a ship twice in the same half-hour)
leaked. She leaked fully, generously, overflowingly, all over--
like a basket. I took an enthusiastic part in the excitement
caused by that last infirmity of noble ships, without concerning
myself much with the why or the wherefore. The surmise of my
maturer years is that, bored by her interminable life, the
venerable antiquity was simply yawning with ennui at every seam.
But at the time I did not know; I knew generally very little, and
least of all what I was doing in that galere.

I remember that, exactly as in the comedy of Moliere, my uncle
asked the precise question in the very words--not of my
confidential valet, however, but across great distances of land, in
a letter whose mocking but indulgent turn ill concealed his almost
paternal anxiety. I fancy I tried to convey to him my (utterly
unfounded) impression that the West Indies awaited my coming. I
had to go there. It was a sort of mystic conviction--something in