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The weather leech of the topsail shivers, The bowlines strain and the lee shrouds slacken, The braces are taut, the lithe boom quivers, And the waves with the coming squall-cloud blacken. Open one point on the weather bow Is the light-house tall on Fire Island head; There's a shade of doubt on the captain's brow, And the pilot watches the heaving lead.
For a long while for more than an hour, indeed it had seemed as if that black squall-cloud were lying motionless at the horizon an anchored ship, bulging at its wharf. But then, as if its moorings had been cast off, or its sails unfurled, it travelled up with amazing speed. The wind had an easterly slant to it a rare thing with us for a wind from that quarter to bring a heavy storm.
Lower away in the south a rare thing to come from the south in our climate there lay a black squall-cloud with a rounded outline, like a big windbag, resembling nothing so much as a fat boy's face with its cheeks blown out, when he tries to fill a football with the pressure from his lungs. That was an infallible sign. The first cloud, which was travelling fast, might blow over.
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