We mere landsmen are indebted to the bold navigators for at least the courtesy of giving what old Chaucer calls "faith and full credence" to what they tell us about what they have actually seen and suffered. It seems to me that there is exceedingly bad taste in that sceptical levity which men of the study, those stay-at-home travellers occasionally exhibit in their criticisms of what seamen tell us, for instance, about the height of the waves. They laugh at the seaman who tells us of waves a hundred feet in height. Engineers affect to be able to measure the tempest, and to assure us that twenty feet is the utmost height of a wave. On the other hand, an excellent observer assures us, on the testimony of his own sight, that standing in safety on the shore, observing calmly, and in absence of all distraction, he has seen waves that would overtop the towers of Notre Dame, and the heights of Montmartre. It is abundantly evident that these opposing witnesses speak of two totally different things; and hence their flat contradiction. If we speak of the lower bed of the tempest, of those long bowling waves which even in their fury preserve a certain regularity, probably the calculation of the engineers is pretty exact. With their rounded crests alternating with depressed valleys, it is likely enough that their utmost height does not greatly exceed twenty or five-and-twenty feet. But your chopping sea, where cross wave furiously hurls itself against cross wave, rises far higher. In their fierce collision they hurl each other to a quite prodigious height, and fall with a crushing weight, assailed by which the stoutest craft would open her seams, and go bodily down into the dark depths of the angry sea. Nothing so heavy as sea water, in those mighty shocks, those enormous falls of which sailors truthfully speak, and of which none but those who have witnessed them, can calculate the tremendous greatness and power.