Yet I heard no orders given; I saw no sailors running aloft, and only one figure crouching over the wheel: He was lost behind his great beard as behind a snow-drift. But the startling speed with which we scudded along did not lift a solitary hair of that beard, nor did the old and withered face of the pilot betray any curiosity or interest as to what breakers, or reefs, or pitiless shores, might be lying in ambush to destroy us. Still on we swept; and as the traveller in a night-train knows that he is passing green fields, and pleasant gardens, and winding streams fringed with flowers, and is now gliding through tunnels or darting along the base of fearful cliffs, so I was conscious that we were pressing through various climates and by romantic shores. In vain I peered into the gray twilight mist that folded all. I could only see the vague figures that grew and faded upon the haze, as my eye fell upon them, like the intermittent characters of sympathetic ink when heat touches them. Now, it was a belt of warm, odorous air in which we sailed, and then cold as the breath of a polar ocean. The perfume of new-mown hay and the breath of roses, came mingled with the distant music of bells, and the twittering song of birds, and a low surf-like sound of the wind in summer woods. There were all sounds of pastoral beauty, of a tranquil landscape such as Prue loves--and which shall be painted as the background of her portrait whenever she sits to any of my many artist friends--and that pastoral beauty shall be called England; I strained my eyes into the cruel mist that held all that music and all that suggested beauty, but I could see nothing. It was so sweet that I scarcely knew if I cared to see. The very thought of it charmed my senses and satisfied my heart. I smelled and heard the landscape that I could not see. Then the pungent, penetrating fragrance of blossoming vineyards was wafted across the air; the flowery richness of orange groves, and the sacred odor of crushed bay leaves, such as is pressed from them when they are strewn upon the flat pavement of the streets of Florence, and gorgeous priestly processions tread them under foot. A steam of incense filled the air. I smelled Italy--as in the magnolia from Bourne's garden--and, even while my heart leaped with the consciousness, the odor passed, and a stretch of burning silence succeeded. It was an oppressive zone of heat--oppressive not only from its silence, but from the sense of awful, antique forms, whether of art or nature, that were sitting, closely veiled, in that mysterious obscurity. I shuddered as I felt that if my eyes could pierce that mist, or if it should lift and roll away, I should see upon a silent shore low ranges of lonely hills, or mystic figures and huge temples trampled out of history by time.