The rigging tautened, and the huge sails flapped in thunder as the Harpoon sped upon her course, and all around was greatness and the present majesty of power.  Augusta looked aloft and sighed, she knew not why.  The swift blood of youth coursed through her veins, and she rejoiced exceedingly that life and all its possibilities yet lay before her.  But a little more of that dreadful place and they would have lain behind.  Her days would have been numbered before she scarce had time to strike a blow in the great human struggle that rages ceaselessly from age to age.  The voice of her genius would have been hushed just as its notes began to thrill, and her message would never have been spoken in the world.  But now Time was once more before her, and oh! the nearness of Death had taught her the unspeakable value of that one asset on which we can rely—­Life.  Not, indeed, that life for which so many live—­the life led for self, and having for its principle, if not its only end, the gratification of the desires of self; but an altogether higher life—­a life devoted to telling that which her keen instinct knew was truth, and, however imperfectly, painting with the pigment of her noble art those visions of beauty which sometimes seemed to rest upon her soul like shadows from the heaven of our hones.

* * * * *

Three months have passed—­three long months of tossing waters and ever-present winds.  The Harpoon, shaping her course for Norfolk, in the United States, had made but a poor passage of it.  She got into the south-east trades, and all went well till they made St. Paul’s Rocks, where they were detained by the doldrums and variable winds.  Afterwards she passed into the north-east trades, and then, further north, met a series of westerly gales, that ultimately drove her to the Azores, just as her crew were getting very short of water and provisions.  And here Augusta bid farewell to her friend the Yankee skipper; for the whaler that had saved her life and Dick’s, after refitting once more, set sail upon its almost endless voyage.  She stood on the breakwater at Ponta Delgada, and watched the Harpoon drop past.  The men recognized her and cheered lustily, and Captain Thomas took off his hat; for the entire ship’s company, down to the cabin-boy, were head-over-heels in love with Augusta; and the extraordinary offerings that they had made her on parting, most of them connected in some way or other with that noble animal the whale, sufficed to fill a good-sized packing-case.  Augusta waved her handkerchief to them in answer; but she could not see much of them, because her eyes were full of tears.  She had had quite enough of the Harpoon, and yet she was loth so say farewell to her; for her days on board had in many respects been restful and happy ones; they had given her space and time to brace herself up before she plunged once more into the struggle of active life.  Besides, she had throughout been treated with that unvarying kindness and consideration for which the American people are justly noted in their dealings with all persons in misfortune.