It was still long before daylight, and he fell asleep again.  This time on awaking he found himself in the corridor speaking to some stewards, already at work.  It slowly dawned upon him that he was clad in nothing but his night-shirt and must have been walking in his sleep.  What, had he turned into a somnambulist!  He was utterly disconcerted and ashamed and had to let one of the stewards help him back to his cabin.

He found his cabin covered with about three inches of water, from a leaky pipe.  Crawling into bed, he squeezed himself, to keep from being tossed out, into a hollow between the boards, a method he himself had devised.

Shortly after six, he was on deck sitting on his bench, warming his hands on his hot tea-cup.  The weather was frightful.  The morning was of an icy dreariness unsurpassed.  The fury of the sea had waxed.  The falling twilight was a new sort of darkness.  The roaring of the waters and the raging of the winds were deafening.  Frederick’s ear-drums ached.  But the ship struggled on, managing to pursue its course, though slowly.

And suddenly—­Frederick did not know whether to trust his hearing—­above the noise of the sea rose Ariel strains, beginning solemnly and swelling serenely.  It was the chords and melodies of a church choral.  He was moved almost to tears.  He recollected that this dreary morning was a Sunday morning, and the orchestra, even in the midst of the cyclone, was carrying out its instructions to begin the day with devotional music.  It was playing in the unused smoking-room half way up the companionway, whence the strains ascended faintly to the deck.  Everything lying heavily upon Frederick’s soul in chaos and struggle melted away before the seriousness, the simplicity, the innocence of this music.  It brought back memories of his boyhood, of many a morning full of innocence, expectation, and anticipations of great happiness; Sundays, holidays, his father’s and his mother’s birthdays, when the chorus of a regimental song woke him up in the morning.  What was to-day compared with that past?  What lay in between!  What a sum of useless work, disenchantment, recognition bitterly paid for, possession snatched after passionately and then lost, love trickled away, passion trickled away; how many meetings and hard partings; what an amount of wrestling with everything in general and in particular; how much purity of purpose dragged in the mud; how much striving for freedom and self-determination, resulting only in impotent, blind imprisonment.

Was he really a person of so much importance before God that He visited him with such bitter, refined chastisements?

“I’m wild!” screamed Hans Fuellenberg, who appeared at the entrance to the companionway.  “I won’t put up with it, or else I’ll go insane.”

Nevertheless, Hans Fuellenberg and Frederick and all the other passengers, though in the last degree exhausted, terrorized, desperate, expecting each moment to be their last, lived through the same awful strain, from hour to hour, from morning till evening, and from evening till morning again.