They had been steeped in troubled bodings all this time - their faces showed it. I called an escort and we galloped five miles to a hilltop overlooking the sea. Where was my great commerce that so lately had made these glistening expanses populous and beautiful with its white-winged flocks? Vanished, every one! Not a sail, from verge to verge, not a smoke-bank - just a dead and empty solitude, in place of all that brisk and breezy life.

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