This was not the tame pigeon, the rosy, humble, domestic creature who was to make me a home and rear me children.

A sea bird with broad white wings swooped down upon the water, now dark and ridged, rested there a moment, then swept away into the heart of the gathering storm.

She was liker such an one.

Such birds were caught at times, but never tamed and never kept.
The lightning, which had played incessantly in pale flashes across the low clouds in the south, now leaped to higher peaks and became more vivid, and the muttering of the thunder changed to long, booming peals.
Thirteen years before, the Virginia storms had struck us with terror.
Compared with those of the Old World we had left, they were as cannon to the whistling of arrows, as breakers on an iron coast to the dull wash of level seas.

Now they were nothing to me, but as the peals changed to great crashes as of falling cities, I marveled to see my wife sleeping so quietly.