Thus far we had been favoured with splendid weather, but on the fifth day out from Saint Vincent I observed that the barometer and the wind were falling simultaneously, and by sunset the trade wind had died away to nothing.  The western half of the sky looked as though it were on fire, and the horizon in that quarter was piled high with great smears of dusky, smoky-looking cloud, heavily streaked with long splashes of vivid orange and crimson colour.  As a spectacle it was magnificent, but the magnificence was gloomy, sombre, and threatening beyond anything that I had ever beheld.  Nevertheless, I had seen skies not altogether unlike it before, and my experience had taught me that such gorgeously lurid displays of colour always portended the approach of bad weather, very frequently of the hurricane type.  Furthermore, my "Sailing Directions for the West Indies" warned me that we were now in a part of the world which is subject to such terrific outbreaks of atmospheric strife.  I therefore resolved to take time by the forelock.  Fortunately in such small craft as schooners the amount of work involved in the operation of "snugging-down" is not great, and in less than half an hour we had got our yards and topmasts down on deck and the whole of our canvas snugly stowed, with the exception of the foresail, which, having been close-reefed, remained set, so that we might retain some sort of command over the vessel.