I ran my eye over the ship. The scene had that sort of morbid interest to me which the architecture and furniture of a prison cell takes for one who is to pass many months in it. I beheld a long white deck, extending from the taffrail into the bows, with several structures breaking the wide lustrous continuity: one forward was the galley, the ship's kitchen; this side of it was a large boat with sheep bleating inside her; whilst underneath was a sty-full of pigs, flanked by hen-coops whose bars throbbed with the ceaseless protrusion and withdrawal of the flapping combs of cocks and the heads of hens. Near us was a great square hatch, covered over with a tarpaulin, and farther aft, as the proper expression is, was a big glazed frame for the admission of light into the cabin; some distance past it a sort of box, curved to the aspect of a hood, called the companion-way, conducted you below. At the end of the ship was the wheel, like a circle of flame with the brasswork of it flashing to the sun, and immediately in front stood the compass box or binnacle, glittering like the wheel, and trembling to its height upon the white planks like a short pillar of fire. A number of sailors hung about the forecastle, and a man leaned in the little door of the galley in a red shirt, bare to the elbows, eying us, with a pair of fat, dough-like, tattooed arms crossed upon his breast, a picture of stupid, sulky curiosity. We stayed for a few minutes talking in the gangway; Mrs. Burke then asked me to step below and see my cabin, and I went down the steps followed by the rest, and entered the ship's little plain state-room. I stopped at the foot of the ladder and drew my breath with difficulty. What was it? An extraordinary sensation of icy chill had passed through me. It was over in an instant, but it was as though the hand of death itself had clutched my heart. Was it a presentiment working so potently as to affect me physically? Was it some subtle motion of the nerves influenced by the sight of the interior, and by the strange shipboard smells in it which there was no virtue in the hanging pots of flowers to sweeten? I said nothing. My father halted to the arrest of my hand, supposing I wished to look about me, and yet, oh, merciful God! when I date myself back to that hour, and think of me as entering that cabin for the first time, and then of what happened afterwards, I cannot for an instant question--nay, with fear and awe I devoutly believe--that the heart-moving sensation of chill which came and went in the beat of a pulse was a breath off the pinion of my angel of fate or destiny, stirring in the thick-ribbed blackness of the future at sight of my first entrance into the scene of my distress. Do not think me fanciful nor high strained in expression or imagination. My meaning will be clear to you.