The old engine made so melancholy and uncommon a sound that I might have lain a week in my bed speculating upon it, without even hitting the truth. I took notice that the water came up clear and bright as glass, a sure sign that it was entering freely. A sullen shade still hung in the weather, the sky was of slate, with a small scud flying under it of the hue of sulphur, but the breeze was no more than a fresh gale of which we were making a fair wind, the yards braced very nearly square, and the Braave sulkily swinging through it with a noise of boiling at her bows. I was not a little excited by this combination of glass-bright gushing and square yards, and after going forward for the comfort and sweetness of a canvas bucketful of salt water foaming like champagne as I lifted it out of the snow-flaked, dark-green surge, I walked on to the poop, where stood Arents alone, and stepped up to the binnacle. The card made a west-north-west course, the wind on the larboard quarter. I ran my eye over the sea, but the olive-complexioned hue worked with a sulky sinuosity naked against the livid shadow, and the deep looked indescribably gloomy and swollen and confused, though the sun had been risen above half-an-hour. Arents was not a man I held in awe, albeit many might have deemed his unearthly pallor more dreadful than most of the others because of the great breadth of fat and hairless face it overlay; yet I was determined not to question him lest he should repulse me. I therefore contented myself with a short salute and lay over the rail watching the swollen bodies of water and wondering what plan Vanderdecken was now upon, until the chimes of the clock in the cabin made me know it was breakfast time. The captain came to the table with a stern and bitter expression in his countenance. It was possible he had been on deck throughout the greater part of the night, but he exhibited no trace of the fatigue you would expect to see in one that was of this earth. Methought, as I glanced at him, that sleep must be a mockery to these men, who, being deathless, stood in no need of that repose which counterfeiting death, reinvigorates our perishable frame every morning with a quickening as of a resurrection. What has one to whom the grave is denied to do with slumber? Yet if a whiter pallor was possible in Vanderdecken I fancied I witnessed it in him now. His eyes were angry and bright; the skin of his forehead lay in folds upon his heavy brows, and yet there was the stillness of a vitality, numbed or blasted by disappointment or exhausted by passion, in his manner.