Page:Twenty years before the mast - Charles Erskine, 1896.djvu/227

 during which time we drifted about, backing and filling, in the doldrums, hearing not so much as a whisper of  the wind nor the flapping of a sail. But for the long, huge, heaving swell of old ocean’s mighty bosom, I  might say that we were in the ocean’s graveyard.

There is a dreary monotony in a dead calm at sea which vividly calls to mind Byron’s striking pen-picture:

