For help in his sore
need, instinct had led him to danger.
Half way to the point of Scaurnose, he came round on the other
tack, and stood for the Death Head.
Glancing from the wallowing floor beneath him, and the one wing
that bore him skimming over its million deaths, away to the House
of Lossie, where it stood steady in its woods, he distinguished
the very window whence, hardly an hour ago, from the centre of the
calm companionship of books, he had gazed out upon the wind swept
waste as upon a dream.
"How strange," he thought, "to find myself now in the midst of what
I then but saw! This reeling ocean was but a picture to me then--
a picture framed in the window; it is now alive and I toss like a
toy on its wild commotion. Then I but saw from afar the flashing of
the white out of the blue water, and the blue sky overhead, which
no winds can rend into pallid pains; now I have to keep eye and
hand together in one consent to shun death; I meet wind and wave on
their own terms, and humour the one into an evasion of the other.
The wind that then revealed itself only in white blots and streaks
now lashes my hair into my eyes, and only the lift of my bows is
betwixt me and the throat that swallows the whales and the krakens.
"Will it be so with death? It looks strange and far off now, but
it draws nigh noiselessly, and one day I meet it face to face in
the grapple: shall I rejoice in that wrestle as I rejoice in this?
Will not my heart grow sick within me? Shall I not be faint and
fearful? And yet I could almost wish it were at hand!
"I wonder how death and this wan water here look to God! To him is
it like a dream--a picture? Water cannot wet him; death cannot
touch him.
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