The moment we emerged from the Bosphorus into the Black Sea I knew it, and everyone else on the _France_ knew it. The creak of timbers and the swish of clothes describing parabolas on their hooks, with the crash of glass inside the saloon, told me that we were at sea. A look through the small six inch port above my bunk revealed the intermittent light of the moon now and again breaking through fleecy clouds that were scudding across the sky. To the thud of the engines just forward of my bunk, I could hear the seas swishing past. The little port-hole was buried every other minute in seething froth as we rolled in the swell. We were doing a good fourteen knots an hour. I comforted my inward apprehensions with the cheering thought that this speed maintained would land us in Odessa even earlier than the captain had promised. I slept until daylight, when I was awakened by the increased rolling of the ship. The prospect of good weather, which the moon of the previous night had seemed to hold forth, was dissipated as I took a glance out of the port. The dull leaden sky had turned loose a very demon of a raw and piercing wind that was beating the sea into a passion of discontent. The _France_, straining and groaning in every joint, was valiantly driving her little nose into each sullen sea that rose before her as though to block her course and drive her back. In other seas that I had traveled, the sweep is long between the waves. Even on the Pacific a small boat can crest the waves, slip downward in the hollow and raise to meet the next. It was different here. Before a ship can recover from the first wave another sweeps her deck. In great black ridges of spray-flanked water, the seas crash upon the decks. Now they are dead ahead, now from the starboard quarter and now from the port. It seemed to me that it must be rougher than usual, but I said nothing. My instinct was to go on deck at once, but internal premonitions of disaster urged me to remain in my bunk for the moment. Morris, on the couch in the saloon, was groaning out his anguish in spite of his thirteen trips across the Pacific. I smiled as I listened to him. “Morris,” I called. “Standing by like steel, sir,” he answered in a weak voice as he staggered to the door of my tiny cabin. He was the palest colored man I ever saw. I was somewhat to the bad myself, but he looked so much worse than I felt that it cheered me up. “Sick?” I queried. “Not seasick, sir,” he replied, his pride and his thirteen trans-Pacific journeys holding him up, “but suffering from a touch of indigestion, sir. Indeed, it is nothing more. The fact is, I attribute it to the potted ham of last night, sir,” and he withdrew hastily. A moment later the hatch was thrown open and Stomati floundered down the ladder in a cloud of spray. He shook the salt water out of his hair and grinned a little as he delivered a message from the skipper.