When the dusk came along, the silence upon the sea was something
to put all sorts of moods into a man. The sky was a hovering velvet
stretch of stars, with a young moon lying curled among them, and
winkings of delicate violet sheet-lightning down in the southwest,
as though some gigantic-tinted lantern, passing, flung its light
upon the dark blue obscure there. The captain went below, after a
long, impatient look round, and I overhung the rail, peering into
the water alongside, or sending my gaze into the frightful distance,
where the low-lying stars hung. With every soft dip of the ship's
side to the slant of the dark folds, there shot forth puffs of
cloudy phosphor, intermixed with a sparkling of sharper fires now
and again, blue, yellow, and green, like worms of flame striking
out of their cocoons of misty radiance. The noise of the canvas on
high resembled the stirring of pinions, and the cheep of a block,
the grind of a parrel, helped the illusion, as though the sounds
were the voices of huge birds restlessly beating their pinions
aloft.

Presently the man at the wheel startled me with an observation.
I went to him, and he pointed upward with a long, shadowy arm. I
looked, and saw a corposant, as it is called at sea,--a St. Elmo's
fire,--burning at the end of the crossjack-yard. The yard lay
square, and the polished sea beneath gave back the reflection so
clearly that the mystic fire lay like a huge glow-worm on the black
mirror.

"There should be wind not far off," said the helmsman, in a subdued
voice; for few sailors can see one of these lights without a stirring
of their superstitious instincts, and this particular exhalation