The sun had now been hid for some minutes, and the apple-green of the sky was rapidly becoming colder and more indistinct, though the edge of a solitary dark cloud, hanging a few degrees above the horizon, was yet tipped with a faint crimson. Meantime the stars began to appear in the opposite firmament, one after another twinkling into sight, as if by magic, until the whole eastern heaven was gemmed with them. I looked around the horizon. Never before had its immensity so forcibly impressed me. The vast concave swelling high up above me and gradually rounding away toward the distant seaboard, seemed almost of illimitable extent; and when, over all the mighty space of ocean included within its circuit, my eye rested on not a solitary sail, I experienced a sensation of loneliness such as no pen can describe. And when the breeze again died away, leaving the sails idly flapping to and fro as the schooner rocked on the swell, my imagination suggested that perhaps it might be our doom, as it had been that of others, to lie for days, nay weeks and months, powerless in the midst of that desert latitude, shut out from the world, enclosed within the blue walls of that gigantic prison: and I shuddered, as well I might, at the very idea of such a fate. It was now a dead calm. No perceptible agitation could be discovered on the surface of the deep, except the long undulating swell which never subsides, and which can be compared to nothing but the heavy breathing of some gigantic monster when lulled to repose. Now and then, however, a tiny ripple, occasioned by the gambols of some equally tiny inhabitant of the deep, would twinkle sharp in the starlight; while, close under the shadow of our hull, a keen eye might detect hundreds of the fairy fire-flies of the ocean, their phosphoric lanterns glittering gaily as they shot to and fro. Absorbed in the contemplation of the spectacle, I suffered more than half an hour to pass unheeded; and it was not until the sea began to be sensibly agitated, and the wind to freshen, that I looked up. The change which had come over the firmament astonished me, and requires a passing description.