"And why this particular difficulty, captain?" Eve, who was amused with Mr. Truck's modes of speech, pleasantly inquired. "Is it not equally easy to go from one part of the ocean, as from another?"
"Equally easy! Bless you, my dear young lady, you never made a more capital mistake in your life. Do you imagine it is as easy to go from London to New York, now, as to go from New York to London?"
"I am so ignorant as to have made this ridiculous mistake, if mistake it be; nor do I now see why it should be otherwise."
"Simply because it is up-hill, ma'am. As for our position here to the eastward of the Azores; the difficulty is soon explained. By dint of coaxing I had got the good old ship so as to know every inch of the road on the northern passage, and now I shall be obliged to wheedle her along on a new route, like a shy horse getting through a new stable-door. One might as well think of driving a pig from his sty, as to get a ship out of her track."
"We trust to you to do all this and much more at need. But to what will these grand omens lead? Shall we have a gale, or is so much magnificent menacing to be taken as an empty threat of Nature's?"
"That we shall know in the coarse of the day, Miss Effingham, though Nature is no bully, and seldom threatens in vain. There is nothing more curious to study, or which needs a nicer eye to detect, than your winds."
"Of the latter I am fully persuaded, captain, for they are called the 'viewless winds,' you will remember, and the greatest authority we possess, speaks of them as being quite beyond the knowledge of man: 'That we may hear the sound of the wind, but cannot tell whence it cometh, or whither it goeth.'"
"I do not remember the writer you mean, my dear young lady," returned Mr. Truck, quite innocently; "but he was a sensible fellow, for I believe Vattel has never yet dared to grapple with the winds. There are people who fancy the weather is foretold in the almanack; but, according to my opinion, it is safer to trust a rheumatis' of two or three years' standing. A good, well-established, old-fashioned rheumatis'--I say nothing of your new-fangled diseases, like the cholera, and varioloid, and animal magnitudes--but a good old-fashioned rheumatis', such as people used to have when I was a boy, is as certain a barometer as that which is at this moment hanging up in the coach-house here, within two fathoms of the very spot where we are standing. I once had a rheumatis' that I set much store by, for it would let me know when to look out for easterly weather, quite as infallibly as any instrument I ever sailed with. I never told you the story of the old Connecticut horse-jockey, and the typhoon, I believe; and as we are doing nothing but waiting for the weather to make up its mind--"
"The weather to make up its mind!" exclaimed Eve, looking around her in awe at the sublime and terrific grandeur of the ocean, of the heavens, and of the pent and moody air; "is there an uncertainty in this?"
"Lord bless you! my dear young lady, the weather is often as uncertain, and as undecided, and as hard to please, too, as an old girl who gets sudden offers on the same day from a widower with ten children, an attorney with one leg, and the parson of the parish. Uncertain, indeed! Why I have known the weather in this grandiloquent condition for a whole day. Mr. Dodge, there, will tell you it is making up its mind which way it ought to blow, to be popular; so, as we have nothing better to do, Mr. Effingham, I will tell you the story about my neighbour, the horse-jockey. Hauling yards when there is no wind, is like playing on a Jew's-Harp, at a concert of trombones."