Next morning I came down to embark at the island; but a violent storm coming on, I took refuge in the house of the keeper of the lighthouse, on the point of the rock. The channel was covered with vessels: they had been all the morning sweeping away to the westward, with studding-sails on both sides, low and aloft; now they were fast measuring back their distance, and dashing past us under close-reefed topsails. We scrambled over the sharp points of the ledges of rock to watch the current where it is most straitened and convulsive. The dark deep current close in-shore was running out; a hundred yards or so from the rock it was running in; farther out again, there appeared another stream from the eastward. This must have been the spot where the action took place between Didius and the Carthaginian galleys, “when those were seen pursuing and these flying, who hoped not for victory and dreamed not of flight.” About one o’clock, it suddenly cleared up, and the sun burst forth in brightness over the cooled and watered earth. The shroud of the heavens broke up into heaps of white clouds, “showing the dark blue,” as the Highlanders say, “through the windows of the heavens.” The bosom of the Straits and the brows and heads of the hills were mottled by their shadow, as they drifted along, chasing each other: at equal pace poured the current, and in the same direction. Soon reissuing from cove and rock, flocks of white sails were crowding on their way back over the course which they had already twice measured. Invited by the breeze, and shamed by the example, we lingered for a while to enjoy the pleasant mood of this fitful torrent, and then hurried on board, and were soon sweeping down before the batteries. We took good care to clear our colours and to make them blow out well, to save them the trouble of hulling us, as they did an American in the morning, because his stripes and stars had not been flashing to windward of the spanker, with as much coolness as if they had been firing at a partridge. That sort of thing is all very well at Gibraltar, with a thousand guns in battery, and four thousand men behind them; but four artillery-men with three mounted field-pieces, to be busy with rammer, sponge, cartridge, and ball, ready to blaze away at all the nations of the world, should any luckless wight forget to exhibit a bit of bunting by day, or a lantern by night, is about the most absurd prank one ever heard of. They will fire as glibly on a three-decker as on a cock-boat, if the ensign happens to draw to leeward, as was the case recently with the _Phantom_, at Ceuta; and yet they make no profit of the statistical information they seek with so much ardour. They have no toll to receive, as at the Sound; no sovereignty to assert, as at the Dardanelles; no neighbour to browbeat, and no smuggling to protect, as at Gibraltar:--besides, we sink their vessels.