We reached the Gulf Stream some time during that night. I remember that I was awakened before dawn by the heeling of the ship so that I was all but pitched out of my bunk. I sat up and held on, and heard the rain, and the sound of feet on deck, and orders shouted, and the hoarse singsong of the crew as they manned the sheets and the halliards and the braces, and the noise of the yards swinging, and the sails slatting. There was no singsong from the men aloft taking in sail. The ship was pitching and rolling badly. The old Clearchus was good at that. Then Captain Nelson went on deck, and I dressed hastily, and went out too into the pitchy blackness of a stormy night at sea. The two men at the wheel were having a hard time of it. I took my stand by the weather corner of the after house, hugging it close, to keep out of the rain, and looked out at the wet deck, which gleamed faintly now and then, and at the shadowy forms of the men who happened to pass near me, and at the white tops of the seas rolling past. The foam seemed to shine with a light of its own. Then the ship gave a more violent plunge than ever, and I could tell by the sound that she had shipped a sea over the bows, although I could see nothing; but as she rose I heard it come rushing aft, and the next moment the water was swirling in the near scupper, and slopped up against the leeward wall of the house. I stood there for some time, until long after they had sail reduced to reefed topsails, and my feelings were a curious mixture of exultation in the wildness of the night and—I may as well confess it now, although nothing could have drawn such a confession from me then—a sneaking fear that the ship {43} would not stand such buffeting. I thought of home, and knew very well that my mother was lying awake and listening to the wind and the rain, and thinking of me. And I knew that I was in my father’s thoughts too, although those thoughts could not keep him awake. He knew that I was taking but the ordinary risks that every rightly constituted boy has to take, and goes to meet gladly. Indeed the risk was not great. It did not seem possible that I had left home less than two days before, and that it was such a few miles behind me. My thoughts being in that direction, I decided to keep a journal of some sort, and send it home when a chance offered. The chance may be a brief one, merely a passing ship, when there is no time to write letters. I suppose I must have made up my mind that if I was to be drowned I should be drowned, and I might as well be comfortable about it, for as it was beginning to be gray in the east, with the melancholy waste of wild waters just visible, and that sinking of the soul which always comes at such a time, I went below and turned in again and went to sleep immediately.