There was something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely
wearying, in these uncommanded evolutions. It is bitter to return
to infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon
your feet, by the hand of some one else. The air besides, as it is
supplied to you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the
eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing,
till his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow no longer. And
for all these reasons-although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed
joy in my surroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed,
to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there about me, swift
as humming-birds - yet I fancy I was rather relieved than otherwise
when Bain brought me back to the ladder and signed to me to mount.
And there was one more experience before me even then. Of a
sudden, my ascending head passed into the trough of a swell. Out
of the green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of
sanguine light - the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven
above a vault of crimson. And then the glory faded into the hard,
ugly daylight of a Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a gray sea,
and a whistling wind.
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