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meaning of such a "shower" as this. In a few moments our decks were half full of water, the scuppers sobbing madly the roaring of the rain and hail smiting the ocean drowned all other sounds. The sea was so phosphorescent that a piece of wood, dropped overboard, chipped out fire as though it had burst into flames. Judge then of the effect of that Niagara-fall of rain and hail! The

ocean was flashed up into a plain of fire. It swept sparkling in one vast incandescent sheet to its limits, dimming into sickly sulphur as it approached the horizon. You might suppose that such an illumination as this would have revealed anything afloat upon it; but though I took a long look round, being deeply impressed by this sudden, wonderful burning of the ocean, I saw nothing, till all at once the darkness was split by a flash of lightning that leapt from the clouds away over our fore-yard-arm and shot into the water, as it seemed to me, a league distant on our starboard quarter, and then to this mighty flare there sprang out upon the view a large ship, well within a mile of us, snugged down to her topsails. The sight made me catch my breath for an instant, for the wonder of it lay in her having been invisible until the lightning threw her up, so bright was the water with the lashing of the rain. One waited for a second flash to make sure; and I dare say had she foundered before it came, there would not have been wanting people amongst us to swear that they had seen the Phantom Ship.

Indeed it is quite possible that this grand old legend had its origin in some atmospheric effect due to lightning, moonshine, or fog. I have sometimes at sea, but more often in our narrow waters, watched a ship for a few moments, removed my gaze, and thinking of her presently, looked for her again and found her gone. This is one of those mysterious disappearances with which all seamen are acquainted.

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evanishment however grows more perplexing when, after searching for the vessel and believing her to be gone for good, you look for her again later on and find her almost in the same place. A thing of this kind would have been accepted by the early mariner as a miracle. He would have come home with a yarn about it as long as his arm; and so have fired the first poetically minded wedding guest he could constrain with his eye with visions and fancies of a spectral ship. Be this as it will, disappearances and reappearances of this kind can be due to nothing but the subtle and imperceptible gathering of haze about the object. Mist will often take its complexion from the atmosphere. I have seen a bank of haze of so skylike an azure that but for the curvature of the sea-line under it caused by the deflective sweep of its base, I should have accepted it as pure blue air. White mists also, of a slightly opaline tincture corresponding perfection with the hue of the heavens beyond, I have detected only by the apparent depression of the horizon under them. A ship may be in the act of piercing one of these elusive veils with her flying jibboom when you first catch sight of her. She is as plain in your sight as your own vessel; yet when you seek her a minute after she has vanished, and there is nothing in the sombre or sunny texture of the stuff she has entered to persuade you that what you are viewing is not the same brown or cerulean sky that stands over and on either hand of it.

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To the mariner the fog is about the most obnoxious of all the conditions of his vocation. He is not likely to understand me then when I speak of its beauties; yet I must assure him, nevertheless, that many lovely atmospheric and other effects are produced on the waters by those luminous, enfolding bodies of vapour, the silence of whose white caverns is violated in these scientific times by the horrible braying of the steam-horn and the

terrified fluttering of the engine-room bell. The kind of fog I have in my mind is the snow-like body of vapour sometimes not very much taller than the Folkestone cliffs, sometimes so lowlying indeed that you may see the lofty spars of a big ship forking out of it into the blue air and bright sunshine, when the rest of the structure is as absolutely hidden as an object rolled up in wool. As a rule very little wind accompanies these appearances. The mass of delicate, smoke-like, sparkling particles slides along softly, and it is therefore slow and tender in its revelations, submitting nothing which the manner of its discovery does not render beautiful. A man standing on the deck of a ship in the heart of a soft and gleaming thickness may not be able to see the mainmast from the distance of the wheel. The silence is peculiar, there is a certain quality of oppressiveness in it; nor is this wholly fanciful for though there be a deep hush on the sea, yet, when you emerge into clear air, the difference between the stillness you have quitted and that which you have entered is instantly perceptible. Presently there is a little flaw, a chasm opens in the luminous body of whiteness : the space of water that glances like steel around the ship enlarges its narrow horizon: there is a general brightening of light, though all the forward part of the ship is still hidden in the smother, and the only mast you can see looks as if it were sawed off a few feet above the deck. If the coast be nigh or ships be at hand, there will happen now a slow stealing out of objects, and the sight is one which I think every man who has seen it will recall with admiration. Off Dover a ship I was aboard of sailed into such a fog as I am describing, and lay without motion for some hours in the midst of it. Any trickle of tide there may have been kept company with the vapour. There was no air, and the water came out of the thickness to the bends with the polish and gleam of oil. There was

nothing to break the quiet but the distant faint thunder of the wash of surf, or sometimes the remote tinkling of a ship's bell, or the rattle of a little winch in some nearer craft trembling upon the ear like the sound of musketry. Presently there was a movement of wind, and, as the soft fingers of the draught of air tenderly drew aside the curtains of the mist, the pictures offered were a series of beautiful surprises. All about us stood the white fog upon the sea in elbows and points, in seams, ravines and defiles, like to the scarred and precipitous front of chalk cliffs; and now there would ooze out a little smack, whose shadow within the vapour held you speculating till the sunshine smote it into the proportions and colour of some cutter or lugger-rigged craft, with reddish mainsail gently swaying and a sou'-wester or two over the rail; and now, as the snow-like thickness was rent afresh, some stout brig with black or chequered sides, and a blue vein of smoke going up straight out of her galley-chimney and then arching over like the curl of a plume, would be unveiled; and no matter how ugly the craft was that would be thus suddenly confessed, the witchery of the shining background of cloud entered her and submitted her as dainty and delightful, full of a grace that owed nothing to form; so that even a wretched little coaster, with boom, foresail and a suit of canvas as manycoloured as Joseph's coat, met the eye clothed with beauty from the buttons of her trucks down to the tremulous silver of the reflection of her sails under her. Then presently glimpses of the land were to be had, the flash of sunward-staring windows ashore, the vivid green of verdure sloping to the edge of the white abrupt, a steamer with raking funnels cautiously coming out, the twinkle of foam upon the margin of grayish shingle.

But you need a mountainous country to obtain the highest and choicest effects of these fog-pictures. The noblest show in this way that I ever beheld was off

Mossel Bay on the South African coast. There the inland mountains tower to an elevation that, though they may be ten or fifteen miles distant, seems to enable them to cast the twilight of their Andean shadows upon the ship. It is like beholding the birth of a world to mark those Titanic peaks growing out of the white envelopment, as though creation were busy in yonder void and shaping a vast territory out of sheer chaotic blind

ness.

Another lovely effect I have often gazed at with delight,-the vision of a ship hovering on the horizon with an atmosphere of shivering brightness between her and the sea-line. Then with the eye or with the telescope she looks to be floating in the blue air. I have seen an airy space of pearl hanging like a cloud over the sea boundary, and I have watched it lifting and lengthening, one shining outline rising to another out of the ocean, until three stately pyramids of canvas have been hove up: then presently the hull rose to complete the symmetrical fabric, and thus, apparently afloat in the azure, the ship has sailed towards us without appearing to touch the sea, until the line of the horizon behind her was level with her counter. Refraction, or some like quality productive of atmospheric effects, will yield many queer and even startling ocean-pictures. The mate of a vessel once called my attention to a ship about four miles distant right abeam. There was a light wind, and the day was wonderfully fine and clear. The stranger was under all plain sail and her yards braced fore and aft, which enabled us to obtain a good view of her canvas. She was so incredibly distorted by the atmosphere as to be unrecognizable as a ship, in the sense I mean of that term. Her masts were curved like the prongs of a pitchfork her hull rounded like the back of a hog: her sails ludicrously elongated her jibbooms twisted into a figure beyond description. I have no doubt we presented the same convulsed

appearance to her. Every man who saw her broke into a loud laugh; yet she was an object to put some queer ideas into the imaginative brain, and I have little doubt that the paternity of many a singular superstition of the sea might be traced to such atmospheric caprices as this.

The effect of a red sunset upon a ship sailing quietly along is a study full of sweetness. The rigging shines like wires of brass, the sails like cloth of gold: there are crimson stars wherever there are windows. Against the soft evening blue she glides glorious as a fabric richly gilt. Sometimes the slow withdrawal of the western splendour from her may be watched; then her hull will be dark with evening shadow, whilst the light, like a golden veil lifted off her by an invisible hand, slides upwards from one rounded stretch of canvas to another, till, burning for a breath like a streak of fire in the dog-vane at the lofty masthead, it vanishes, and the structure floats gray as the ash of tobacco. In this withdrawal of the sun and in the gathering of the shadows of night at sea there is a certain melancholy; but I do not think it can be compared with the spirit of desolation you find in the breaking of the dawn over the ocean. The passage from sunlight to darkness even in the tropics is not so swift but that the mind so to speak has time to accept the change; but there is something in the cold, spiritless gray of dawn that always did and still does affect my spirits at sea. The froth of the running billows steals out ghastly to the faint, cheerless, and forbidding light. Chilly as the night may have been, a new edge of cold seems to have come into the air with the sifting of the melancholy spectral tinge of gray into the east. The light puts a hollow look into the face of the seaman. The aspect of his ship is full of bleakness: the stars are gone, the skies are cold, and the voices of the wind aloft are like a frosty whistling through clenched teeth. A mere fancy of

course which is instantly dissolved by the first level, sparkling beam of the rising sun; but then it is fancy that makes up the life of the sea, for without it what is the vocation but a dull routine of setting and furling sail, of masticating hard beef and pork, of slushing masts, washing decks, and polishing the brassworks! The spacious liquid arena is prodigal of inspiration and of delight to any one who shall carry imagination away with him on a voyage. There may be twenty different things to look at at once, and every one richer, sweeter, and more ennobling than the greatest of human poems to the heart that knows how to watch and receive. shadow of a dark cloud over a ship, with the sunshine streaming white in

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the clear blue foaming seas around: the vision of the iceberg at night, colouring the black atmosphere with a radiance of its own: the tropical blue of the horizon, lifting into brassy brightness to the central dazzle of the sun the airy dyes of the evening over a ship in the far loneliness of the mid-ocean-scores of such sights there are, but what magic is there in human pen to express them? The majesty of the Creator is nowhere so apparent the Spirit of the Universe is nowhere else so present. Those who know most dare least in their desire to reproduce. What other response is there for the heart to make to the full recognition of the eye but the silence of adoration!

W. CLARK RUSSELL,

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FORESTRY.

THE report of the Committee of the House of Commons appointed to consider "Whether, by the establishment of a forest school or otherwise, our woodlands could be rendered more remunerative," has recently been published. And it may be worth while briefly to glance at the condition of forestry in Great Britain at the present time, which has already occupied the attention of three successive Parliamentary Committees, the result of their joint investigations being embodied in the aforesaid report.

I have no intention of inflicting upon my readers any repetition of the recommendations made by the Committee, which are still under consideration, and will no doubt receive careful attention; still less have I any intention of treating the subject from a scientific standpoint for we are told that scientific forestry in this country is conspicuous only by its absence. But I venture to hope that the subject may not be uninteresting to the ordinary reader; while to all who are interested in land, and therefore in any possible means of making it more remunerative and more useful than it unhappily is at present, its treatment should need no apology.

The Crown forests of Great Britain

were originally, as we all know, planted for a specific purpose,-for affording a supply of timber for the construction and maintenance of the Royal Navy. In the year 1812 it was estimated that no less than sixty thousand loads of timber were required annually to maintain the Navy at its then existing strength of from seven to eight hundred thousand tons. Now, it was assumed that not more than

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forty oak trees could stand on an acre of ground, so as to permit their growth to a full size, or to contain each one and a half loads of timber. Fifty acres therefore, were required to produce two thousand tons-the quantity necessary to build a seventy-four-gun ship, and one thousand acres for twenty such ships. And as the oak takes one hundred years to arrive at maturity, the extent of the Crown forests was assumed to be not less than one hundred thousand acres.

Steel and iron have now taken the place of wood in ship-building; and even where wood is used, the teak of Malabar is considered more valuable, especially where iron-plating is required, than English oak. In this respect, therefore, the necessity for scientific forestry has passed away, and sadly does the present condition of the Crown forests prove that such is the case.

Neither is Great Britain dependent, as many other countries are, upon growing forests as a protection for her towns and villages, or upon firewood as her only fuel. Her ships provide her with almost illimitable supplies of sea-borne timber for building and mining purposes; and so long as what is humorously called Free Trade exists, these supplies are not likely to fail. We have, it is true, suffered in the past summer from alternate droughts and floods, much of which might have been prevented by the judicious planting of trees and underwood, more especially on the banks of our rivers; but these have not been sufficiently severe, and their effects have not been sufficiently lasting, as in the southern countries of Europe, to emphasise the necessity or advisability of a study of forestry. In our moist climate, the necessity for

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