So he was never at a loss for words, simple, clear, strong, like blasts of a horn.

His voice at this period was mellow and flexible.  He was a mimic, too; the brighter things he had seen, whether glories of nature or acts of man, had turned to pictures in this man’s mind.  He flashed these pictures one after another upon the trio; he peopled the soft and cushioned drawing-room with twenty different tribes and varieties of man, barbarous, semi-barbarous, and civilized; their curious customs, their songs and chants, and dances, and struts, and actual postures.

The aspect of famous shores from the sea, glittering coasts, dark straits, volcanic rocks defying sea and sky, and warm, delicious islands clothed with green, that burst on the mariner’s sight after rugged places and scowling skies.

The adventures of one unlucky ship, the Connemara, on a single whaling cruise on the coast of Peru.  The first slight signs of a gale, seen only by the careful skipper.  The hasty preparations for it:  all hands to shorten sail; then the moaning of the wind high up in the sky.  All hands to reef sail now—­the whirl and whoo of the gale as it came down on them.  The ship careening as it caught her, the speaking-trumpet—­the captain howling his orders through it amid the tumult.

The floating icebergs—­the ship among them, picking her way in and out a hundred deaths.  Baffled by the unyielding wind off Cape Horn, sailing six weeks on opposite tacks, and ending just where they began, weather-bound in sight of the gloomy Horn.  Then the terrors of a land-locked bay, and a lee shore; the ship tacking, writhing, twisting, to weather one jutting promontory; the sea and safety is on the other side of it; land and destruction on this—­the attempt, the hope, the failure; then the stout-hearted, skillful captain would try one rare maneuver to save the ship, cargo, and crew.  He would club-haul her, “and if that fails, my lads, there is nothing but up mainsail, up helm, run her slap ashore, and lay her bones on the softest bit of rock we can pick.”

Long ere this the poor ship had become a live thing to all these four, and they hung breathless on her fate.

Then he showed how a ship is club-hauled, and told how nobly the old Connemara behaved (ships are apt to when well handled—­double-barreled guns ditto), and how the wind blew fiercer, and the rocks seemed to open their mouths for her, and how she hung and vibrated between safety and destruction, and at last how she writhed and slipped between Death’s lips, yet escaped his teeth, and tossed and tumbled in triumph on the great but fair fighting sea; and how they got at last to the whaling ground, and could not find a whale for many a weary day, and the novices said:  “They were all killed before we sailed;” and how, as uncommon ill luck is apt to be balanced by uncommon good luck, one fine evening they fell in with a whole shoal of whales at play, jumping clean into the air sixty feet long, and coming down each with a splash like thunder; even the captain had never seen such a game; and how the crew were for lowering the boats and going at them, but the captain would not let them; a hundred playful mountains of fish, the smallest weighing thirty ton, flopping down happy-go-lucky, he did not like the looks of it.