Alister and I wasted no time in conversation.

He told me the fall in the barometer was "by-ordinar" (which I knew as well as he); and I told him the wind was undoubtedly falling (which he knew as well as I): and after this inevitable interchange of the uppermost news and anxieties of the occasion, we bade GOD bless each other, and I said the prayers of my babyhood because they were shortest, and fell fast asleep.
The noises that woke us were new noises, but they made up the whole of that peculiar sound which is the sum of human excitement.

"We are going down this time," was my thought, and I found myself less philosophical about it than I had imagined.

Neither Alister nor I were long in putting on our clothes, and we rushed up on deck without exchanging a word.

By the time we got there, where the whole ship's crew had gone before us, we were as wildly excited as any one of them, though we had not a notion what it was all about.