The steamer was oftenest without the sign of any life beyond her.  One day a small bird beat the air with its little wings, under the roof of the promenade, and then flittered from sight over the surface, of the waste; a school of porpoises, stiff and wooden in their rise, plunged clumsily from wave to wave.  The deep itself had sometimes the unreality, the artificiality of the canvas sea of the theatre.  Commonly it was livid and cold in color; but there was a morning when it was delicately misted, and where the mist left it clear, it was blue and exquisitely iridescent under the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by the falling spray.  These were rare moments; mostly, when it was not like painted canvas, is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smooth cleavage.  Where it met the sky it lay flat and motionless, or in the rougher weather carved itself along the horizon in successions of surges.

If the sun rose clear, it was overcast in a few hours; then the clouds broke and let a little sunshine through, to close again before the dim evening thickened over the waters.  Sometimes the moon looked through the ragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemed to shine till morning, and shook a path of quicksilver from the horizon to the ship.  Through every change, after she had left the fog behind, the steamer drove on with the pulse of her engines (that stopped no more than a man’s heart stops) in a course which had nothing to mark it but the spread of the furrows from her sides, and the wake that foamed from her stern to the western verge of the sea.

The life of the ship, like the life of the sea, was a sodden monotony, with certain events which were part of the monotony.  In the morning the little steward’s bugle called the passengers from their dreams, and half an hour later called them to their breakfast, after such as chose had been served with coffee by their bedroom-stewards.  Then they went on deck, where they read, or dozed in their chairs, or walked up and down, or stood in the way of those who were walking; or played shuffleboard and ring-toss; or smoked, and drank whiskey and aerated waters over their cards and papers in the smoking-room; or wrote letters in the saloon or the music-room.  At eleven o’clock they spoiled their appetites for lunch with tea or bouillon to the music of a band of second-cabin stewards; at one, a single blast of the bugle called them to lunch, where they glutted themselves to the torpor from which they afterwards drowsed in their berths or chairs.  They did the same things in the afternoon that they had done in the forenoon; and at four o’clock the deck-stewards came round with their cups and saucers, and their plates of sandwiches, again to the music of the band.  There were two bugle-calls for dinner, and after dinner some went early to bed, and some sat up late and had grills and toast.  At twelve the lights were put out in the saloons and the smoking-rooms.