had never seen, and the rigging had a musty odor, so that the whole
craft smelled like a ship-chandler's shop grown mouldy. The figures
glided rather than walked about, and I perceived a strong smell of
cabbage issuing from the hold.

But the most extraordinary thing of all was the sense of resistless
motion which possessed my mind the moment my foot struck the deck. I
could have sworn we were dashing through, the water at the rate of
twenty knots an hour. (Prue has a great, but a little ignorant,
admiration of my technical knowledge of nautical affairs and phrases.)
I looked aloft and saw the sails taut with a stiff breeze, and. I
heard a faint whistling of the wind in the rigging, but very faint,
and rather, it seemed to me, as if it came from the creak of cordage
in the ships of Crusaders; or of quaint old craft upon the Spanish
main, echoing through remote years--so far away it sounded.

Yet I heard no orders given; I saw no sailors running aloft, and only
one figure crouching over the wheel: He was lost behind his great
beard as behind a snow-drift. But the startling speed with which we
scudded along did not lift a solitary hair of that beard, nor did the
old and withered face of the pilot betray any curiosity or interest as
to what breakers, or reefs, or pitiless shores, might be lying in
ambush to destroy us.

Still on we swept; and as the traveller in a night-train knows that he
is passing green fields, and pleasant gardens, and winding streams
fringed with flowers, and is now gliding through tunnels or darting
along the base of fearful cliffs, so I was conscious that we were
pressing through various climates and by romantic shores. In vain I
peered into the gray twilight mist that folded all. I could only see