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When night fell, they went through the sea-fire, which glowed like hot embers, and there was a prolonged and hideous howling up in the air to windward. And cries of distress and howls of mortal agony answered the wind from all the upturned boat keels they sped by, and many hideously pale-looking folks clutched hold of their thwarts.
Darkness descending, and, looking down at the broad wake left by the wheels of the steamboat, we may see sparkles of sea-fire glittering through the gloom. Salem, August 22d. A walk yesterday afternoon down to the Juniper and Winter Island.
I would have declared to all and sundry: "Behold, here is come a bright angel to visit King Hugo; see how young and beautiful she is; mark the slow, heavy turn of her grey eyes; ay, a weighty glance! But there is a shimmer of sea-fire in her hair I love her! Mark her, too, when she speaks, a mouth good and fine, and with ever and again a little helpless look and smile.
Thence, with native audacity, but still with a reserve as characteristic, she flew into the midst of a group of mariners, the swarthy-cheeked wild men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the land; and they gazed wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a flake of the sea-foam had taken the shape of a little maid, and were gifted with a soul of the sea-fire, that flashes beneath the prow in the night-time.
"Na," groaned Saunders, "I wuss to peace she was. But ye mind me that I gat a letter frae the young minister that I was to gie to Meg. But as you're the yin he comes to see, I maun as weel gie't direct to yoursel'." "It wad be as weel," said Jess, with a strange sort of sea-fire like moonshine in her eyes.
The sea-fire, which played on the dark billows near Elias's own boat, shone with an odd vividness in the foam round the other boat, just as if a fire-shovel was ploughing up and turning over the water. In the bright phosphorescence he could plainly make out the rope-ends on board her.
The brig was travelling at the rate of about six knots; at which speed she was wont to create a considerable amount of disturbance in the element through which she ploughed her passage; the water was brilliantly phosphorescent, and as a result of this the wake of the brig was on this occasion a mass of sea-fire, the foam that she churned up on either side of her glowing and sparkling with luminous clouds interspersed with thousands of tiny stars that waxed and waned with every plunge of the vessel.
As a rule, they were unfathomably dark with the lustre of a night-billow through which the sea-fire sparkles; but, occasionally, when she laughed, they took a bright sea-green glitter, as when the sun shines deep down into the sea. Now and again they passed by a boat or a vessel half buried in the sand, out and in of the cabin doors and windows of which fishes swam to and fro.
And, indeed, we soon had evidence of this; for, feeling uneasy upon the matter, I had started to go forward with the intention of warning the look-out men that I had reason to believe there was a ship close ahead of us, and that they must therefore keep an extra bright look-out, when, as I arrived abreast the fore- rigging, my eyes still straining into the darkness ahead, the schooner was hove up on the breast of a heavy, following sea, and as she topped it with the ghostly sea-fire of its fiercely-hissing crest brimming almost to the rail, a black shape seemed to suddenly solidify out of the gloom ahead, apparently within biscuit-toss of our jib-boom end, with an unmistakable wake of boiling foam on each side of it, and the two look- out men yelled, as with one voice, and in the high-pitched accents of sudden alarm.
It was grand sailing weather, the breeze, although strong, being perfectly steady, while the sea was long and regular, allowing the little hooker plenty of time to rise to each as it came rushing down upon her with hissing crest all agleam with sparkling sea-fire.
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