I never saw so great a change in any one as came over Captain Scruggs yesterday during the gale. He was as quiet and retiring as the most bashful of individuals, and in fact exhibited an amount of anxiety surprising in so aggresive and domineering a person. Nearly all masters of sailing ships, as noted before, are nervous in bad weather; and in truth, a gale of wind at sea is something to make one quiet and mindful of man’s trivial strength when measured against the mighty powers of nature. But the captain was unnaturally reserved and almost crushed, and asked me half a dozen times what I thought of it; while at 2.30 in the afternoon, standing on the weather side of the wheel-house, he put his face close to my ear and shouted, “It’s blowing harder than ever,” with a rising inflection, as though awaiting my inexperienced opinion. This morning, however, he was his same old self again, drenching Sammie with heavy showers of profanity on the least provocation. In spite of his depression yesterday, the skipper gave vent to one of his quaint sayings. At the time he had on a cap, which, though not tied under his chin, resisted the utmost violence of the squalls; on commenting upon this to him, he cried, “They’re great things; you ought to have one; ’twould stop on as long as your pants.” Some of the sailors are beginning to grumble even so soon as this. I had a talk with old Kelly this afternoon at the pumps and in a low voice he let fall his opinions on various subjects. Now, this man has been well educated and talks evenly, without effort, and the inflections and tone of his voice indicate that by birth his natural sphere in life is a good deal higher than that of a common sailor. “Well,” he remarked. “I’ve been in square-riggers for thirty-three years now, but I never did see one like this for yelling and cursing; why, they knock all the sense out of a man’s head the way they shout. And work, you talk about galleys, but there never was a gang of slaves driven as we are.” This must be taken with the usual amount of salt, which should always be liberally sprinkled over the conversation of the average sailor; still, when a second mate acknowledges that the men are hard pushed, there is not much doubt about its being true. Kelly is right, though, about the shouting of Captain Scruggs; if there wasn’t so much sea-room I believe that we would all be deafened by this time; and the worst part of it is that this sort of thing is absolutely useless. I have frequently known the skipper to work the men into such a state that they were paralyzed and unable to execute the simplest order. At the present moment, sitting in the cabin, we can hear the wind beginning to sing again in the rigging, and a second gale would not surprise us in the least, for there is, in addition, a heavy swell rolling up from the southwest, all of which cannot be the result of our late gale.