Far away the waste of waters stirred confusedly in the ominous

clear-obscure of immensity. The Matutina was making quick way. She

seemed to grow smaller every minute. Nothing appears so rapid as the

flight of a vessel melting into the distance of ocean.

Suddenly she lit the lantern at her prow. Probably the darkness falling

round her made those on board uneasy, and the pilot thought it necessary

to throw light on the waves. This luminous point, a spark seen from

afar, clung like a corpse light to the high and long black form. You

would have said it was a shroud raised up and moving in the middle of

the sea, under which some one wandered with a star in his hand.

A storm threatened in the air; the child took no account of it, but a

sailor would have trembled. It was that moment of preliminary anxiety

when it seems as though the elements are changing into persons, and one

is about to witness the mysterious transfiguration of the wind into the

wind-god. The sea becomes Ocean: its power reveals itself as Will: that

which one takes for a thing is a soul. It will become visible; hence the

terror. The soul of man fears to be thus confronted with the soul of

nature.

Chaos was about to appear. The wind rolling back the fog, and making a

stage of the clouds behind, set the scene for that fearful drama of wave

and winter which is called a Snowstorm. Vessels putting back hove in

sight. For some minutes past the roads had no longer been deserted.

Every instant troubled barks hastening towards an anchorage appeared

The Man Who Laughs