It was an appropriate relief when the gong sounded for prayer meeting.  The first Saturday night of any other pleasure excursion might have been devoted to whist and dancing; but I submit it to the unprejudiced mind if it would have been in good taste for us to engage in such frivolities, considering what we had gone through and the frame of mind we were in.  We would have shone at a wake, but not at anything more festive.

However, there is always a cheering influence about the sea; and in my berth that night, rocked by the measured swell of the waves and lulled by the murmur of the distant surf, I soon passed tranquilly out of all consciousness of the dreary experiences of the day and damaging premonitions of the future.

CHAPTER III.

All day Sunday at anchor.  The storm had gone down a great deal, but the sea had not.  It was still piling its frothy hills high in air “outside,” as we could plainly see with the glasses.  We could not properly begin a pleasure excursion on Sunday; we could not offer untried stomachs to so pitiless a sea as that.  We must lie still till Monday.  And we did.  But we had repetitions of church and prayer-meetings; and so, of course, we were just as eligibly situated as we could have been any where.

I was up early that Sabbath morning and was early to breakfast.  I felt a perfectly natural desire to have a good, long, unprejudiced look at the passengers at a time when they should be free from self-consciousness —­which is at breakfast, when such a moment occurs in the lives of human beings at all.

I was greatly surprised to see so many elderly people—­I might almost say, so many venerable people.  A glance at the long lines of heads was apt to make one think it was all gray.  But it was not.  There was a tolerably fair sprinkling of young folks, and another fair sprinkling of gentlemen and ladies who were non-committal as to age, being neither actually old or absolutely young.

The next morning we weighed anchor and went to sea.  It was a great happiness to get away after this dragging, dispiriting delay.  I thought there never was such gladness in the air before, such brightness in the sun, such beauty in the sea.  I was satisfied with the picnic then and with all its belongings.  All my malicious instincts were dead within me; and as America faded out of sight, I think a spirit of charity rose up in their place that was as boundless, for the time being, as the broad ocean that was heaving its billows about us.  I wished to express my feelings —­I wished to lift up my voice and sing; but I did not know anything to sing, and so I was obliged to give up the idea.  It was no loss to the ship, though, perhaps.

It was breezy and pleasant, but the sea was still very rough.  One could not promenade without risking his neck; at one moment the bowsprit was taking a deadly aim at the sun in midheaven, and at the next it was trying to harpoon a shark in the bottom of the ocean.  What a weird sensation it is to feel the stem of a ship sinking swiftly from under you and see the bow climbing high away among the clouds!  One’s safest course that day was to clasp a railing and hang on; walking was too precarious a pastime.