It was extraordinary to watch how she behaved.  Enormous seas came surging high to windward, and we, who were standing on the bridge, turned our backs to receive them, with some such remark as:  ‘Ugh, that’s a nasty one coming.’  But the sea never came.  A few yards from the ship it looked over the bulwarks and got ready to hurl itself upon her.  But at the last moment the Fram gave a wriggle of her body and was instantly at the top of the wave, which slipped under the vessel.  Can anyone be surprised if one gets fond of such a ship?  Then she went down with the speed of lightning from the top of the wave into the trough, a fall of fourteen or fifteen yards.  When we sank like this, it gave one the same feeling as dropping from the twelfth to the ground-floor in an American express elevator, ‘as if everything inside you was coming up.’  It was so quick that we seemed to be lifted off the deck.  We went up and down like this all the afternoon and evening, till during the night the wind gradually dropped and it became calm.  That the storm would not be of long duration might almost be assumed from its suddenness, and the English rule —­

Long foretold, long last; Short notice, soon past’ —­ may thus be said to have held good.

“When there is a strong wind on her beam, the Fram does not roll so much as usual, except for an occasional leeward lurch; nor was any excessive quantity of water shipped in this boisterous sea.  The watch went below as usual when they were relieved, and, as somebody very truly remarked, all hands might quite well have turned in, if we had not had to keep a lookout for ice.  And fortune willed it that the day of the hurricane was the first since we had left the Barrier that we did not see ice —­ whether this was because the spray was so high that it hid our view, or because there really was none.  Be that as it may, the main thing was that we saw no ice.  During the night we had a glimpse of the full moon, which gave the man at the wheel occasion to call out ‘Hurrah!’ —­ and with good reason, as we had been waiting a long time for the moon to help us in looking out for ice.

“In weather like this one notices nothing out of the ordinary below deck.  Here hardly anything is heard of the wind, and in the after-saloon, which is below the water-line, it is perfectly comfortable.  The cook, who resides below, therefore reckons ’ugly weather’ according to the motion of the vessel, and not according to storms, fog, or rain.  On deck we do not mind much how it blows, so long as it is only clear, and the wind is not against us.  How little one hears below deck may be understood from the fact that yesterday morning, while it was blowing a hurricane, the cook went about as usual, whistling his two verses of ‘The Whistling Bowery Boy.’  While he was in the middle of the first, I came by and told him that it was blowing a hurricane if he cared to see what it looked like.  ’Oh, yes,’ he said, ’I could guess it was blowing, for the galley fire has never drawn so well; the bits of coal are flying up the chimney’; and then he whistled through the second verse.  All the same, he could not resist going up to see.  It was not long before he came down again, with a ‘My word, it is blowing, and waves up to the sky!’ No; it was warmer and more cosy below among his pots and pans.