and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big
for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming
in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of
reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering
galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the
man in the bass drum.

But more than all else is the consciousness of his utter
helplessness. Succor or sympathy there is none. Penitence for
embarking avails not. The final satisfaction of despairing may not be
his with a relish. Vain the idea of idling out the calm. He may sleep
if he can, or purposely delude himself into a crazy fancy, that he is
merely at leisure. All this he may compass; but he may not lounge;
for to lounge is to be idle; to be idle implies an absence of any
thing to do; whereas there is a calm to be endured: enough to attend
to, Heaven knows.

His physical organization, obviously intended for locomotion, becomes
a fixture; for where the calm leaves him, there he remains. Even his
undoubted vested rights, comprised in his glorious liberty of
volition, become as naught. For of what use? He wills to go: to get
away from the calm: as ashore he would avoid the plague. But he can
not; and how foolish to revolve expedients. It is more hopeless than
a bad marriage in a land where there is no Doctors' Commons. He has
taken the ship to wife, for better or for worse, for calm or
for gale; and she is not to be shuffled off. With yards akimbo, she
says unto him scornfully, as the old beldam said to the little
dwarf:--"Help yourself"

And all this, and more than this, is a calm.