So he was never at a loss for words, simple, clear, strong, like
blasts of a horn.
His voice at this period was mellow and flexible. He was a mimic, too;
the brighter things he had seen, whether glories of nature or acts of
man, had turned to pictures in this man's mind. He flashed these
pictures one after another upon the trio; he peopled the soft and
cushioned drawing-room with twenty different tribes and varieties of
man, barbarous, semi-barbarous, and civilized; their curious customs,
their songs and chants, and dances, and struts, and actual postures.
The aspect of famous shores from the sea, glittering coasts, dark
straits, volcanic rocks defying sea and sky, and warm, delicious
islands clothed with green, that burst on the mariner's sight after
rugged places and scowling skies.
The adventures of one unlucky ship, the _Connemara,_ on a single
whaling cruise on the coast of Peru. The first slight signs of a gale,
seen only by the careful skipper. The hasty preparations for it: all
hands to shorten sail; then the moaning of the wind high up in the
sky. All hands to reef sail now--the whirl and whoo of the gale as it
came down on them. The ship careening as it caught her, the
speaking-trumpet--the captain howling his orders through it amid the
tumult.
The floating icebergs--the ship among them, picking her way in and out
a hundred deaths. Baffled by the unyielding wind off Cape Horn,
sailing six weeks on opposite tacks, and ending just where they began,
weather-bound in sight of the gloomy Horn.
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