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The nervous system need be suffering from no debilitation of superstition to find in the approaching and bursting of the cyclone much that is too terrific to leave room for the display of the qualities of sublimity, though than these revolving tempests few passionate outbreaks of nature yield more. First there is the alarming indication of the barometer, with the slow and sullen glooming over of the heavens, the wan and beamless aspect of the sun or moon, the light of all the stars—even to the most piercing of the planets—being shrouded, along with the sulky heaving of the sea, whose oppressed breathing, as it comes in clogged and thickish draughts of air from the slope of each sullen fold will often be charged with a weedy, fish-like, and decaying odour. Then there is the noise of the approaching storm, that has been described as a rising and falling sound, of a moaning and complaining nature, as though the nearer deep were something sentient and crying to be hidden from the coming furious tormentor. Some have it that this melancholy and malignant echo may be heard as far off as two hundred miles, that it is caused by the actual raging of the hurricane at that distance, and that it is not directly borne to the ear by the wind, but obliquely reverberated by the clouds. A single sentence written by a sailor taking his notes from nature will have in it a suggestion of the ominousness of storm-imports beyond the reach of the finest imaginative description, as, for instance, when the captain of the ship Ida, quoted by Reid, in his interesting work, says: “Fresh gales and squally weather; at four, handed the foretopsail and foresail; at intervals the wind came in gusts, then suddenly dying away, and continued so for four hours.” Here, in a sentence, is fully described the advent of the cyclone, leaving to the fancy to make out for itself all that is comprised of expectation, watchfulness, and even fear in the dull and sudden dying away of the gusts and the silence of the four hours following. Then enter, very often, other formidable conditions, features of livid magnificence, and oppressive because of the confusion they import into aspects of nature familiar to the eye. Of such are the red skies, not the strong westerly glowings following the sinking of the sun, but spaces of blood red witnessed in the midnight zenith, sheets of purple splendour in the east and the like. One testimony speaks of a crimson sky beheld late at night both east and west, for three days before the gale came down; another of the sky catching a red light at sunset, and continuing to glow all over, as though incandescent till past midnight, the smooth breast of the sea reflecting the frightful and wondrous irradiation, so that the ship seemed to rest upon a floor of fire with a red-hot dome above. When finally the storm bursts, it comes in the manner faithfully described in “Purchas,” in the passage referring to the tempest that wrecked one hundred Spanish ships at Tercera: “This storme continued not onely a day or two with one winde, but seven or eight days continually, the winde turninge round about in all places of the compasse at the least twice or thrice during that time, and all alike with a continuall storme and tempest most terrible to beholde, even to us that were on shore much more then to such as were at sea.” In weather-aspects of the cyclonic kind we may safely seek for the origin of many a wild superstition of the ship and the sailor.