I found a real Channel picture stretching round me when I gained the deck; a grey sky, lightened in places with a kind of suffusion of radiance that made one think of the rusty bronze lingering in the wake of an expired sunset. Saving these flaws of dull light, there was no break anywhere visible in the wide cold bald stare of heaven over our mastheads. The strong wind was a dry one, yet the horizon was thick with a look of rain all the way round; and out of the smother in the south, the sea was rolling in heights of a dark green, rich with creaming foam, that somehow seemed to satisfy the eye, as though each frothing crest were a streak of sunshine. There was a smack half a mile to windward of us staggering along and sinking and rising under a fragment of red mainsail; but there was nothing else to be seen in that way. The wind was blowing free for us--almost dead abeam, indeed; and the _Countess Ida_ was swarming through it in a manner to put a quicker beat into the heart at the first sight of the picture she made. The topgallant-sail was set over the single-reefed maintopsail; the whole foresail was on her, and, with the other topsails and a staysail or two, was tearing the great ship through the short savage heapings of water with a power that made one think of steam as trifling by comparison. The forecastle was wet with flying spray. The galley chimney was smoking cheerily, and from all about the long-boat came hearty farmyard sounds of the grunting of pigs and the bleating of sheep and the cackling of hens. There was a gang of seamen at the pumps, and as they plied the brakes with nervous sinewy arms, their song chimed in with the gushing of the water flowing freely to the scuppers, and washing back again to their feet with every roll to windward. Other seamen were at work upon the carronades, or cleaning paint-work with scrubbing-brushes, or coiling gear away upon pins, and so on, and so on. It was after eight, and all hands were on deck, and a fine set of livelies they looked, spite of most of them being snugged up in black or yellow oil-skins. Ships went with full companies in those days, and but for the slenderness of our ordnance, it might have been easy to imagine one’s self on board a man-of-war when one ran one’s eyes over the decks of the _Countess Ida_ and counted the crew, and marked the butcher and butcher’s mates, the cook and _his_ mates, the baker and _his_ mates, the carpenter and _his_ mates, coming and going, and making a very fair of the neighbourhood of the galley.