'I thought I made out two men on top of the deck-house, who seemed in command--one the captain, and the other the mate, as I supposed.' 'No, sir; the capt'n's below. One of them two men you saw was the carpenter Damm; t'other was a boy--a passenger he looked like, though dressed as a sailor man. I didn't hear him give any orders, though his eyes seemed everywhere, and he looked to know exactly what was going forward. A likelier-looking lad I never see. Capt'n's son, I dare say.' 'Well,' said I, sending a glance above and around, 'spite of drunken old Isaac and his prediction of "airthquakes," as he calls them, it's as likely as not, to my mind, that all this gloom will end as it began--in quietude.' The man--one of the most intelligent of our 'longshoremen--shook his head. 'The barometer don't tell lies, sir,' said he; 'the drop's been too slow and regular to signify nothing. I've known a gale o' wind to bust after taking two days to look at the ocean with his breath sucked in, as he do now. This here long quietude's the worst part, and----Smother me! Mr. Tregarthen,' said he, halting and turning his face seawards, 'if the draught that was just now blowing ain't gone!' It was as he had said. The light breathing of air had died out, and the swell was rolling in, burnished as liquid glass. This day-long extraordinary pause in the most menacing aspect of weather that I had ever heard of--and never in my time had I seen the like of it--seemed to communicate its own quality of breathless suspense to every living object my eye rested upon. The very dogs seemed to move with a cowed manner, as though fresh from a whipping. There was no alacrity--little movement, indeed, anywhere visible. Men hung about in small groups and conversed quietly, as though some trouble that had affected the whole community was upon them. The air trembled with the noise of the breaking surf, and there was a note in that voice, sounding as it did out of the unnatural dark hush upon sea and land, that constrained the attention to it as to something new and even alarming. A tradesman, with his apron on and without a hat, would come to his shop-door and look about him uneasily, and perhaps have a word with a customer as he entered before going round the counter and serving him. The gulls flew close inshore and screamed harshly. Here and there, framed in a darkling pane of window, you would see an old face peering at the weather and pale in the shadow. I found my mother a good deal troubled by the appearance of the ship. She asked, with a pettishness I had seldom witnessed in her, 'What does she want? Why does she come here? Do they court destruction?' I told her all that I had learnt about the vessel.