32
CROSSING THE TROPIC.
Eugenia at me, and beckoning and speaking, though I could not hear, and pointing down to ocean, and then long and steadily to heaven, whereat I trembled and sighed, and fears and suspicious fancies, and thoughts of dead things, and musings of preternatural agencies, absorbed my senses, when on a sudden a tremendous conch roar, issuing from under the bows of the ship, startled me from my reverie. It was eight o'clock, and a hoarse piratical Atlantic voice hailed us and demanded who we were; the captain answered with his hat off, for it seems he had been on the station before and recognised the awful sound, and, having told our name and other logbook particulars, concluded, by requesting his Majesty to come on board. Neptune (for it now appeared to be indeed no other than this awful personage) replied that he could not leave his car that night, but he would visit us the next morning. He said; the conchs Tritonian sounded again, the god rushed by in a flaming chariot like unto a tar barrel, which the sailor heaves upon the forecastle, what time he tars the newly twisted yarn; and from yards and masts, main top, top-gallant and royal, down came a cataract of water, which laid some dozen of unwary mariners sprawling in an inundation of Neptunian ichor. At nine the next morning the king came in through one of the bridle ports. He was seated on what men would have supposed to be a guncarriage, and drawn by four marine monsters,