Some people in the dining-saloon sang hymns; the smoking-room was dense with cigar fumes, and the card-players dealt their hands in an atmosphere emulous of the fog without.
The Norumbia was off the Banks, and the second day of fog was cold as if icebergs were haunting the opaque pallor around her.

In the ranks of steamer chairs people lay like mummies in their dense wrappings; in the music-room the little children of travel discussed the different lines of steamers on which they had crossed, and babes of five and seven disputed about the motion on the Cunarders and White Stars; their nurses tried in vain to still them in behalf of older passengers trying to write letters there.
By the next morning the ship had run out of the fog; and people who could keep their feet said they were glad of the greater motion which they found beyond the Banks.

They now talked of the heat of the first days out, and how much they had suffered; some who had passed the night on board before sailing tried to impart a sense of their misery in trying to sleep.
A day or two later a storm struck the ship, and the sailors stretched canvas along the weather promenade and put up a sheathing of boards across the bow end to keep off the rain.

Yet a day or two more and the sea had fallen again and there was dancing on the widest space of the lee promenade.
The little events of the sea outside the steamer offered themselves in their poor variety.

Once a ship in the offing, with all its square sails set, lifted them like three white towers from the deep.