And suddenly--Frederick did not know whether to trust his hearing--above the noise of the sea rose Ariel strains, beginning solemnly and swelling serenely. It was the chords and melodies of a church choral. He was moved almost to tears. He recollected that this dreary morning was a Sunday morning, and the orchestra, even in the midst of the cyclone, was carrying out its instructions to begin the day with devotional music. It was playing in the unused smoking-room half way up the companionway, whence the strains ascended faintly to the deck. Everything lying heavily upon Frederick's soul in chaos and struggle melted away before the seriousness, the simplicity, the innocence of this music. It brought back memories of his boyhood, of many a morning full of innocence, expectation, and anticipations of great happiness; Sundays, holidays, his father's and his mother's birthdays, when the chorus of a regimental song woke him up in the morning. What was to-day compared with that past? What lay in between! What a sum of useless work, disenchantment, recognition bitterly paid for, possession snatched after passionately and then lost, love trickled away, passion trickled away; how many meetings and hard partings; what an amount of wrestling with everything in general and in particular; how much purity of purpose dragged in the mud; how much striving for freedom and self-determination, resulting only in impotent, blind imprisonment. Was he really a person of so much importance before God that He visited him with such bitter, refined chastisements? "I'm wild!" screamed Hans Fuellenberg, who appeared at the entrance to the companionway. "I won't put up with it, or else I'll go insane." Nevertheless, Hans Fuellenberg and Frederick and all the other passengers, though in the last degree exhausted, terrorized, desperate, expecting each moment to be their last, lived through the same awful strain, from hour to hour, from morning till evening, and from evening till morning again. To most of them it seemed impossible to hold out an hour longer. Yet there were to be three days more of it, they were told, before the _Roland_ reached New York. XLVI Monday brought some sunshine, but no diminution of the tempest. It was fearful. Everything on deck not nailed or riveted was removed. The cries at regular intervals piercing the struggling vessel from the steerage more resembled the bellowing of beasts under the knife of the slaughterer than human sounds. Monday night was one prolonged agony. Nobody, unless unconscious from weakness or the tortures of seasickness, closed an eye. At dawn Tuesday morning, each first-class passenger was startled by the word, "Danger!" quietly uttered at his cabin door by a steward.