I held my breath, with his hand on my arm, just at the sight I had seen a thousand times--the white wake running broad away astern, with a mark in the middle as if it had been torn, on to the green yeast of the waves, then right to their black crests plunging in the dark. It was midnight ahead, and the clouds risen aloft over where I had been looking half all hour before; but the long ragged split to westward was opened up, and a clear glaring glance of the sky, as pale as death, shot through it on the horizon. "I can't be sorry for having gone to sea," said Westwood again; "but isn't it a better thing to leave home and friends, as those men do, for the sake of carrying the gospel to the heathen?" As soon as we wheeled round, with the ship before us, leaning over and mounting to the heave, and her spread of canvass looming out on the dark, my thoughts righted. "Well," said I, "it may be all very well for some--every one to his rope; but, for my part, I think if a man hadn't been made for the sea, he couldn't have built a ship, and where would your missionaries be _then_? You're older than I am, Westwood, or I'd say you let some of your notions run away with you, like a Yankee ship with her short-handed crew!" "Oh, Ned," said he, "of all places in the world for one's actions coming back on him the sea is the worst, especially when you're an idler, and have nothing to do but count the sails, or listen to the passengers' feet on deck. These two days, now, I've thought more than I ever did in my life. I can't get that man's death out of my head; every time, the sea flashes round me as I come from below, I think of him--it seems to me he is lying yet by the side of the Channel. I can't help having the notion he perhaps _fired in the air_!" "'Twas a base lie!" said I; "If _he_ weren't _there_, you wouldn't be here, I call tell you, Westwood." "I don't know how I shall ever drag through this voyage," continued he. "If there were a French gunboat to cut out to-morrow morning, or if we were only to have a calm some day in sight of a Spanish slaver,--'tis nothing but a jogging old Indiaman though! I shall never more see the flag over my head with pride--every prospect I had was in the service!"