The emotion of light-heartedness was ended; it had been but as the gleam of a star in black water on a cloudy night--the sky was folded up, my heart was dark again, I found no light nor life of hope in it. They say that hope springs eternal; I vow to God then I felt as hopeless as if my end was at hand whilst I sat alone when they had gone to show a light on the hull. I closed my eyes that I might not see the rat should it come, and so, sitting with the glow of the fire upon my face, I beheld a vision of my house: it rose upon my darkened gaze; I saw the wintry scene of Channel waters, the glance of foam through the flying clouds of snow; I saw myself walking with my sweetheart upon the stretch of sands, pausing to gaze at the beauty of the forming breaker and to hearken to the cries of the skyful of blown gulls. I saw my father; but what I chiefly remembered was the sensation of bitter cold which had sunk chill to heart and marrow, when I entered for the first time the cabin I was now occupying. I shivered and buried my face and rocked myself, my eyes still sealed. I may have lost thought of time in musing; I started, looked round, and found by the hour that they had been on deck nigh twenty minutes. I thought this was a long time for Captain Burke to keep his wife exposed, and still I concluded that the job of securing a lantern to the bowsprit might run into time aboard a dancing, jumping, slippery hulk; so I continued to wait, all the while straining my ears, till hearing was made an anguish of by the constant cheats of sound. I could bear it no longer. They had been absent half an hour and five minutes. I did not expect to hear their footfalls through the frozen snow on the planks; nor would their voices reach me if they remained forward; but why did not they come? I waited another ten minutes, then went on deck. I looked, and was almost paralysed with terror; had I been an instant sooner, an instant later, it could not have been; but my eye went to it as I rose through the hatch at the breathless moment of its happening--and this was it: low over the sea in some quarter I could not name hung the moon, red as the sun in fog; she had just broken out through a mass of heavy black vapour; a ragged edge as of scud was floating off her upper limb like a last lingering shadow of eclipse, as I looked; and right athwart the orb, centering it, was the body of a bird, doubtless an albatross; and the instant picture was that of some wondrous, gigantic, glowing shield hanging over the sea, and approaching the hull on the back of a huge seafowl. But in a heart's beat the deception went: the bird whose distance created that marvellous illusive perspective curved in its flight and winged out of the illuminated circle and was gone, and in the next breath a lift of black stuff like the dingy smouldering of a candle-wick overspread the moon and hid her.