staggered up the companionway on deck.  The wind was still blowing a gale, and we showed no canvas but one close-reefed maintopsail.  Great massive mounds of blue water piled themselves up in the concealment of the low-hanging rain-clouds, rushed out upon us with white foaming crests ten feet above the quarterdeck, and broke into clouds of blinding, strangling spray over the forecastle and galley, careening the ship until the bell on the quarter-deck struck and water ran in over the lee gunwale.  It did not exactly correspond with my preconceived ideas of a storm, but I was obliged to confess that it had many of the characteristic features of the real phenomenon.  The wind had the orthodox howl through the rigging, the sea was fully up to the prescribed standard, and the vessel pitched and rolled in a way to satisfy the most critical taste.  The impression of sublimity, however, which I had anticipated, was almost entirely lost in the sense of personal discomfort.  A man who has just been pitched over a skylight by one of the ship’s eccentric movements, or drenched to the skin by a burst of spray, is not in a state of mind to contemplate sublimity; and after going through a varied and exhaustive course of such treatment, any romantic notions which he may previously have entertained with regard to the ocean’s beauty and sublimity are pretty much knocked and drowned out of him.  Rough weather makes short work of poetry and sentiment.  The “wet sheet” and “flowing sea” of the poet have a significance quite the reverse of poetical when one discovers the “wet sheet” in his bed and the “flowing sea” all over the cabin floor, and our experience illustrates not so much the sublimity as the unpleasantness and discomfort of a storm at sea.

  BRIG “OLGA,” AT SEA,
  July 27, 1865.

I used often to wonder, while living in San Francisco, where the chilling fogs that toward night used to drift in over Lone Mountain and through the Golden Gate came from.  I have discovered the laboratory.  For the past two weeks we have been sailing continually in a dense, wet, grey cloud of mist, so thick at times as almost to hide the topgallant yards, and so penetrating as to find its way even into our little after-cabin, and condense in minute drops upon our clothes.  It rises, I presume, from the warm water of the great Pacific Gulf Stream across which we are passing, and whose vapour is condensed into fog by the cold north-west winds from Siberia.  It is the most disagreeable feature of our voyage.

Our life has finally settled down into a quiet monotonous routine of eating, smoking, watching the barometer, and sleeping twelve hours a day.  The gale with which we were favoured two weeks ago afforded a pleasant thrill of temporary excitement and a valuable topic of conversation; but we have all come to coincide in the opinion of the Major, that it was a “curious thing,” and are anxiously awaiting the turning up of something else.  One cold, rainy, foggy day