“Our Heavenly Father keeps vigil, I think, sometimes with especial care over this highway between the outer world and the desolate habitations of His chosen people.”
“Hark, the sailors are singing! How strange it is to sing in such perils,” spoke the maiden.
“They’re as happy now as the wave-walking petrels. The Levant has done its worst; they know this by the coming of the rain, hence they sing their ‘Lightning Song.’”
“Lightning song?” queried the maiden.
“Listen! How they explode their vocalized breaths in hissings, whizzings, followed by the prolonged crash made by stamping feet and clapping hands at the end of every stanza. That chorus is meant to imitate those heralds of the thunder, the flashing lightnings.”
“But it seems presumptuous to me. The lightning is so dreadful!”
“Not that which comes as ‘a funeral torch to Euroclydon,’ as the sailors say. Some of them call it ‘the winking and blinking of St. Elmo going to sleep.’”
“Oh, Cornelius, the storm is breaking! I see a star; yes two!” rapturously cried the maiden.
“Truly, yes; ‘Castor and Pollux,’ the ‘Twins,’ the ‘Sailor’s Delight!’ They say these stars are storm rulers and friends of the mariner. Now hear how they shout their song! They see the stars!”
Above the subsiding wind and waves, rose the words of the singers: