“Come on deck,” he said, without any further explanation, and led me up the steel ladder to the top of the gratings and out on the deck. I could scarcely believe my eyes. The darkness of dusk had settled down upon us, and cloud upon cloud of snow were driving past us. I could barely see across the deck where the captain and the bulk of the crew were wringing their hands. As they all spoke at the same time, either in Greek or some other unknown tongue, and as each seemed to have a distinct and separate idea in mind as to what the exigencies of the situation required, it was difficult to gather what all the excitement was about. Everybody was presenting at one and the same moment a different course of action, each of which it would appear was the only road to safety. The captain urged in Greek that turning about and going somewhere astern was the only thing to do. One engineer advised Sulina in broken English, while the other had some ideas in Greek which have not yet come through. The Turkish fireman and others of our crew all wanted to do something or other, and each was howling the merits of his policy at the top of his lungs in his own peculiar dialect. Stomati was there with his seven different languages, which he was using all at once. Someone had dug him out of the galley and brought him forward to use his influence on the situation. Speaking a word in each of the seven languages to one of English, he started out into a detailed account of the storms of the Black Sea, their origin and cause, and their inevitably fatal termination. He had all the others faded for noise, and he soon had them in the background. Already the sea was lashing itself into a vortex of fury. The engineer had eased her down to half speed. I could scarcely believe my eyes. An hour before I had not seen a cloud in the sky, and yet we now appeared to be in the heart of a very enterprising blizzard. However, I could not see the overpowering danger, and personally I favored Odessa as being as safe as any other course and most convenient to the ends I had in view. Stomati finally got my ear, and, backed by old man Gileti, Spero and the mate, explained that these storms were the peril of the Black Sea; that at any moment it might turn up a cyclone and bring up seas that would swamp us in five minutes. I could not see how this could be possible myself, and neither did Morris, who had recovered his equilibrium, and we told them so. Stomati at once reached into the past and told of the wreck of the Roumanian mail, a 4000-ton boat of 21 knots, that had gone down only 20 miles from where we were, in just such a storm. Everyone knew of a dozen similar cases, and when word went aboard of what Stomati was saying, they all began at once to tell of the disasters that they knew of personally. I was beginning to be impressed, when, without warning, just as it had come, the snow ceased, and in two minutes the sun was out and shining brightly, with