On hearing eight bells last night I supposed it to be twelve o’clock. Having gone to bed at half past eight I felt rested, looked out of my window and thought I saw “The Dipper,” not knowing but that the ship was tacking and going North. Wishing to salute our old friend, the north star, I put on my wrapper and went on deck and was told by the man at the wheel that it was five o’clock. The eight bells were for four o’clock instead of twelve, so soundly had I slept. I staid up to see the sunrise, wishing to correct the impression which I had long cherished that there is more to be enjoyed in the idea of sunrise than in its actual beauty. This I was willing to attribute to the want of disposition when drowsy to appreciate the morning. We are prejudiced in favor of a departing day, look kindly on the advancing darkness; we have pleasant associations with the season of repose; it awakens no apprehensions of care, nor of labor; each step of coming night is associated with quiet, while the opening day is the signal for noise; we are not so much disposed to welcome an untried day with its liabilities, as a finished day which can make no new demands upon us. The valedictory of sundown implies less responsibility than the salutatory of a new day. The progressive development of evening with the softening, fading colors, its pathos, finds us more disposed to sympathize with it than we are with a day yet to be tested. But morning has it votaries and its poetry. Therefore,
“Now while the Heaven by the sun’s team untrod
Hath took no print of the approaching light,”
let me see once more if the beauty of morning is real or wholly ideal. There are no birds in our tops to herald its coming; no living things to make it appear that they welcome the return of light, the flying fish are no more of them on the wing than when the ship at night breaks in among them, nor do the porpoises gambol more at day break than at noon. There is a touch of pathos in seeing the stars pale in the growing light; but they cannot awaken much sentiment in us; we find it, if at all, in the victories of light over darkness; the imprint of beauty on monotony; the responses of the zenith and then of the west to the first outgoings of the morning in the east, the crimson bars, the purpling cloud, the snowy top of a pile whose base is yet black. But do we not yield a ready response to these oft quoted words, or do we pass them over as the desponding language of a decaying race: “Let others hail the rising sun,” and count it as merely an act of resistless sympathy to “bow to him whose course is run?” It must be acknowledged that sitting on deck three quarters of an hour in a dishabille dress in the middle of January to see day break, required the temperature of Pacific latitudes to make the experience pleasant. I could not decide which to choose, abstractly. “The day is Thine, the night also is Thine.”
LOW TONES OF NATURE.
One cannot but be impressed with the same thing at sea which meets us everywhere on the land, the low pitch of natural tones, in the wind, the thunder, the waves in mid ocean. If the thunder made the same indiscreet noises as some of our locomotives, thunder storms would be more appalling than they ever are now. May we not see the benevolence of God in this? As one sits for a long time soothed by the wind blowing through the grass, so in listening to the waves around the ship he is not agitated but composed. Even in a tempest the key note of the wind through the cordage has a low pitch; “strong without rage,” much of the time. So with the roar of the sea. Men’s voices in a multitude met for conversation partake of the same quality. I remember that some years ago several gentlemen were in the Exchange in an English metropolis on some ordinary business day, and on going upstairs they noticed the uniform pitch which the voices below naturally assumed. One or two of these gentlemen were musical men, who, on being appealed to, gave it as their opinion that the pitch was on F, and there being no excitement the hum or droning sound continued uniform on that low note. One may catch that note much of the time at sea; yet there is no painful monotone in nature. There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification; yet a wonderful harmony prevails, without any artificial arrangement to keep the ruling pitch at F.
THE SHIP’S GUNS.
Our two guns, nine pounders, have been raised from the hold and painted black. They have been in the hold much of the time, and unless we meet a pirate they will not be needed, except in case of their being required to announce an astounding passage. A hundred and twelve days is the ship’s shortest passage. We are only twenty-five hundred miles from San Francisco, which is small compared to the fifteen thousand five hundred with which we began.
THE SHIP PUT IN PERFECT ORDER.
Every thing about the ship, outside as well as inside, is in beautiful order. Even the belaying pins, of which there are about forty, including all on each side of the deck and about the masts, have been scraped and varnished. No house on shore is in a more creditable state of neatness. No idleness is allowed, but we are not so much at a loss to find employment for the sailors as was one captain, who, when everything about his ship was in perfect order, still kept his men occupied by setting them to scrape the anchors.