belaying-pin.

A sort of loathing comes into a man with a calm like this. "The
very deep did rot," says the poet; and you understood his fancy
when you marked the blind heave of the swell to the sun standing
in the midst of a sky of brass, with his wake under him sinking in
a sinuous dazzle, as though it was his fiery glance piercing to the
green depths a thousand fathoms deep. It was hot enough to slacken
the nerves and give the imagination a longer scope than sanity
would have it ride by.

That was why, perhaps, I found something awful and forbidding in
the sunset, though at another time it might scarcely have detained
my gaze a minute. But it is true, nevertheless, that others besides
me gaped at the wonderful gushings of hot purple,--arrested whirlpools
of crimson haze, they looked,--in the heart of which the orb sat
rayless, flooding the sea with blood under him, so magnificently
fell was the hue, and flushing the sky with twenty dyes of gold
and orange, till, in the far east, the radiance fainted into the
delicacy of pale amber.

"Yon's a sunset," said Captain Matthews, a North of England man,
to me, "to make a fellow think of the last day."

"I'm looking at it, sir," said I, "as though I had never seen a
sunset before. That's the oddest part of it, to my mind. There's
fire enough there to eat a gale up. How should a cat's-paw crawl
then?" And I softly whistled, while he wetted his finger and held
it up; but to no purpose; the draught was all between the rails,
and they blew forward and aft with every swing of the sails.