It was damp, depressing, heart-subduing. The philosophy of the mariner, which is one of endurance, and of that species of submission which is attended with sea blessings and the profanities of the ocean-parlour, breaks down in the fog. Here is the helplessness, here is the sealed eye, the spiriting of groping anxiety, which is a sort of anguish. It is not his ship or himself that he fears; the emotions bred by fog are ahead or abeam, and it need not be steam, for a dirty little brig or schooner, with her half-dozen of a crew shouting their consternation under the foretopmast stay, has been known to smite and sink an ocean palace full of light, of superb machinery, of saloon tables glowing with fruit and plate, and populous with diners. The deck was not to be comfortably measured in a quarter-deck walk, in blackness so dense that if you swerved by so much as two degrees of angle of foot you thumped your breast against the bulwarks. Hardy laid hold of the wet weather vang on the quarter and fell into reflection, for loneliness breeds thought, and no man is more lonely than the officer of the watch on board a merchantman. His mind went again to Julia Armstrong, but it had found an unsettling fascination in Captain Layard, and it quickly returned to him. He could not doubt that he was a little mad; his ideas were strange, yet his speculations showed thought and culture. He was insane to one to whom he talked freely, but to his crew, to whom he would not and did not talk, he must be the commonplace "old man" of the quarter-deck, and in this way Hardy feared he might prove dangerous even to tragedy. The ship's bell was hung in the wake of the galley, and a little clock, illuminated by a bull's-eye lamp, was hung up under a penthouse on a timber erection just before it. A lookout man would walk to the clock to see the time, and at ten he struck "four bells," at which hour it was as black and thick as ever after its first coming; the light breeze blew, and the ship swayed softly through the void. Hardy made his way forward to see to the dog. He struck between two men who were walking the deck, and one muttered, "What cheer?" "By God, my lads," said Hardy, "you'll not find out what a wolf's had for dinner by squinting down his throat!" There was a faint haze about the forescuttle: it came up into the inky thickness from the forecastle lamp. It was a slight relief, and even a rest for the eye, but the shadow forward was deeper than it was aft, for up there in the void was the raven thundercloud of foresail and foretopsail, and further forward yet, like ebon waterspouts soaring from sea to topmast head, were the midnight dyes of the jib and staysail.