THE land announced at the moment when the sea was closing over the corpse of the poor sailor was low-lying and of a yellow colour. This line of slightly elevated downs was Long Island, a great sandy bank enlivened with vegetation, which stretches along the American coast from Montauk Point to Brooklyn, adjoining New York. Several yachts were coasting along this island, which is covered with villas and pleasure-houses, the favourite resorts of the New Yorkists.
Every passenger waved his hand to the land so longed for after the tedious voyage, which had not been exempt from painful accidents. Every telescope was directed towards this first specimen of the American continent, and each saw it under a different aspect. The Yankee beheld in it his mother-land; the Southerner regarded these northern lands with a kind of scorn, the scorn of the conquered for the conqueror; the Canadian looked upon it as a man who had only one step to take to call himself a citizen of the Union; the Californian in his mind’s eye traversed the plains of the Far West, and crossing the Rocky Mountains had already set foot on their inexhaustible mines. The Mormonite, with elevated brow and scornful lip, hardly noticed these shores, but peered beyond to where stood the City of the Saints on the borders of Salt Lake, in the far-off deserts. As for the young lovers, this continent was to them the Promised Land.
In the meanwhile the sky was growing more and more threatening. A dark line of clouds gathered in the zenith, and a suffocating heat penetrated the atmosphere as though a July sun was shining directly above us.
“Would you like me to astonish you?” said the Doctor, who had joined me on the gangway.
“Astonish me, Doctor?”
“Well, then, we shall have a storm, perhaps a thunder-storm before the day is over.”
“A thunder-storm in the month of April!” I cried.
“The Great Eastern does not trouble herself about seasons,” replied Dean Pitferge, shrugging his shoulders. “It is a tempest called forth expressly on her account. Look at the threatening aspect of those clouds which cover the sky; they look like antediluvian animals, and before long they will devour each other.”
“I confess,” said I, “the sky looks stormy, and were it three months later I should be of your opinion, but not at this time of year.”
“I tell you,” replied the Doctor, growing animated, “the storm will burst out before many hours are past. I feel it like a barometer. Look at these vapours rising in a mass, observe that cirrus, those mares’ tails which are blending together, and those thick circles which surround the horizon. Soon there will be a rapid condensing of vapour, which will consequently produce electricity. Besides the mercury has suddenly fallen, and the prevailing winds is south-west, the only one which can brew a storm in winter.”
“Your observations may be very true, Doctor,” said I, not willing to yield, “but who has ever witnessed a thunder-storm at this season, and in this latitude?”
“We have proof, sir, we have proof on record. Mild winters are often marked by storms. You ought only to have lived in 1172, or even in 1824, and you would have heard the roaring of the thunder, in the first instance in February, and in the second in December. In the month of January, 1837, a thunder-bolt fell near Drammen in Norway, and did considerable mischief. Last year, in the month of February, fishing-smacks from Tréport were stuck by lightning. If I had time to consult statistics I would soon put you to silence.”
“Well, Doctor, since you will have it so, we shall soon see. At any rate, you are not afraid of thunder?”
“Not I,” replied the Doctor. “The thunder is my friend; better still, it is my doctor.”
“Your doctor?”
“Most certainly. I was struck by lightning in my bed on the 13th July, 1867, at Kew, near London, and it cured me of paralysis in my right arm, when the doctors had given up the case as hopeless.”
“You must be joking.”
“Not at all. It is an economical treatment by electricity. My dear sir, there are many very authentic facts which prove that thunder surpasses the most skilful physicians, and its intervention is truly marvellous in apparently hopeless cases.”
“Nevertheless,” said I, “I have little trust in your doctor, and would not willingly consult him.”
“Because you have never seen him at work. Stay; here is an instance which I have heard of as occurring in 1817. A peasant in Connecticut, who was suffering from asthma, supposed to be incurable, was struck by lightning in a field, and radically cured.”
In fact I believe the Doctor would have been capable of making the thunder into pills.
“Laugh, ignoramus!” said he to me. “You know nothing either of the weather or medicine!”