While I stood surveying the murky scene, that was gradually growing more dim with an insensible thickening of the air, several drops of rain fell, each as large as a half-crown. 'Stand by now for a flash o' lightning,' old Isaac cried in his trembling voice; 'wance them clouds is ripped up, all the water they hold 'll tumble down and make room for the wind!' But there was no lightning. The rain ceased. The stillness seemed to deepen to my hearing, with a fancy to my consciousness of a closer drawing together of the shadows overhead. ''Tain't so wery warm, neither,' said old Isaac; 'and yet here be as true a tropic show as old Jamaikey herself could prowide.' Every sound was startlingly distinct--the calls and cries of the fellows near the pier, as they ran their boats up; the grit of the keels on the hard sand, like the noise of skates travelling on ice; the low organlike hum of the larger surf beating upon the coast past Bishopnose Point; the rattle of vehicles in the stony streets behind me; the striking of a church bell--the hoarse bawling of a hawker crying fish: it was like the hush one reads of as happening before an earthquake, and I own to an emotion of awe, and even of alarm, as I stood listening and looking. I hung about the boat-house for hard upon two hours, expecting every minute to see the white line of the wind sweeping across the sea into the bay; for by this time I had persuaded myself that what motion there was above was out of the westward; but in all that time the glass-smooth dark-green surface of the swell was never once tarnished by the smallest breathing of air. Only one thing that was absent before I now took notice of: I mean a strange, faint, salt smell, as of seaweed in corruption, a somewhat sickly odour of ooze. I had never tasted the like of it upon the atmosphere here; what it signified I could not imagine. One of my boat's crew, who had paused to exchange a few words with me about the weather, called it the smell of the storm, and said that it arose from a distant disturbance working through the sea through leagues and leagues, as the dews of the body are discharged through the pores of the skin. This same man had walked up to the heights near to Hurricane Point to take a view of the ocean, and now told me there was nothing in sight, save just a gleam of sail away down in the north-west, almost swallowed up in the gloom. He was without a glass, and could tell me no more than that it was the canvas of a ship. 'Well,' said I, 'nothing, if it be not steam, is going to show itself in this amazing calm.' And, saying this, I turned about and walked leisurely home.