For the first and last time, perhaps, in his life, he felt fear; a vague, awful dread of unseen and inevitable possibilities.

Why should not calamity fall on him, wave after wave?
Was it not falling on him already?
Why should he not grow sick to-morrow, break his leg, his neck--why not?
What guarantee had he in earth or heaven that he might not be "snuffed out silently," as he had seen hundreds already, and die and leave no sign?
And there sprang up in him at once the intensest yearning after his father and the haunts of his boyhood, and the wildest dread that he should never see them.

Might not his father be dead ere he could return ?--if ever he did return.

That twelve thousand miles of sea looked to him a gulf impassable.

Oh, that he were safe at home! that he could start that moment! And for one minute a helplessness, as of a lost child, came over him.
Perhaps it had been well for him had he given that feeling vent, and, confessing himself a lost child, cried out of the darkness to a Father; but the next minute he had dashed it proudly away.
"Pretty baby I am, to get frightened, at my time of life, because I find myself in a dark wood--and the sun shining all the while as jollily as ever away there in the west! It is morning somewhere or other now, and it will be morning here again to-morrow.