Drive away your fears with respect to a sea voyage, my dear sister, for mine has been a very speedy one, though we were overtaken in our passage by a dreadful storm. You know on shore I can talk very philosophically of a storm as highly necessary to purify the air; but on the sea, where the view is almost boundless, and one seems particularly exposed to its fury, I felt myself struck with a solemn kind of dread: it was as if the clouds were pouring with accumulated fury, from the four quarters of the heavens, to burst over our heads. Never did I observe the lightning with so much attention as in that wide extensive prospect. It really was a fearful, but at the same time a beautiful sight; I trembled while I gazed, I do not pretend to deny it; and the distress of some of my fellow-travellers almost infected me with fears that my reason condemned, until I began to think it was a kind of mistrust of the goodness of heaven, which I had so often experienced, when I gave myself up to unreasonable fears. I soon, then, grew more composed, but I was moved with indignation when I heard the foolish jests of two gay young fellows after the storm was over; for it appeared to me almost impious to mock at so awful an appearance, in which God made his almighty power very manifest. When the waves began to subside, I viewed with reverence the wonders of the deep; and asked myself from whence came this lightning and rattling thunder? What causes the clouds, which consist of water, to produce such a tremendous clatter? You know that philosophers have discovered that thunder is only occasioned by the compression of the clouds, and that the lightning is the effect of this concussion. But let us change the subject.