me with his usual courtesy.  He was very, very sorry that he could not stay to converse with me, but a patient in the inner parlour required his immediate attendance; he must therefore—.  I entreated him not to apologize; my business was simple—­it was merely to ascertain at what hour the first packet sailed; and having so said, and received a satisfactory reply, I prepared to quit the shop, when just as I was turning round to shut the door, I caught a glimpse through the half-closed curtains that shaded the inner room of a cheek and one eye.  The cheek was swollen, and a solitary patch of snuff rested, like a fly, upon its surface.  It was the Mysterious Tailor; he had come in to have his tooth pulled out.

Notwithstanding my anxiety to quit Bologne, it was evening before I was on board the packet; nor did I feel myself at ease, until the heights had dwindled to a speck, and the loud carols of the fishermen returning home from their day’s sport, had sunk into a faint, undistinguished whisper.  Our vessel’s course for the first hour or so was delightful.  Towards night, the weather, which had hitherto proved so serene, began to fluctuate; the wind shifted, and gradually a heavy swell came rolling in from the north-east towards us.  As the hour advanced, a storm seemed advancing with it; and a hundred symptoms appeared, the least of which was fully sufficient to certify the coming on of a tremendous hurricane.  Our captain, however—­a bronzed, pinched-up little fellow, whom a series of north-westers seemed to have dried to a mummy—­put a good face on the matter, and our mate whistled bluffly, though I could not help fancying that his whistle had something forced about it.

We had by this time been tossing about upwards of four hours, yet despite the storm, which increased every moment in energy, our vessel bore up well, labouring and pitching frightfully to be sure, but as yet uninjured in sail, mast, or hull.  As for her course, it was—­so the mate assured me—­“a moral impossible to say which way we were bound, whether for a trip to Spain, Holland, or Van Dieman’s Land; it might be one, it might be t’other.”  Scarcely had he uttered these words, when a long rolling sea came sweeping on in hungry grandeur towards us, and at one rush tore open the ship’s gun-wale, which now, completely at the mercy of the wave, went staggering, drunken, and blindfold, through the surge.  From this fatal moment the sailors were kept constantly at the pumps, although so instantaneous was the rush of water into the hold, that they did little or no good; there seemed, in fact, not the ghost of a chance left us; even the mate had ceased whistling, and the captain’s oaths began to assume the nature of a compromise between penitence and hardihood.

It was now midnight, deep, awful midnight; the few remaining passengers had left the deck and retreated into a bed which they shared in common with the salt water.  The Captain stood, like one bewildered, beside the helm, while I lay stretched along the forecastle, watching, as well as I could, the tremendous rushing of the waves.  It was during a partial hush of the storm, when the wind, as if out of breath, was still, that a shifting light attached to some moving body, came bearing down full upon us.