around him over the vast and voiceless blue. 

 The Pacific has three blues: the blue of morning, the blue of midday, and the blue of evening. But the blue of morning is the happiest: the happiest thing in colour—sparkling, vague, newborn—the blue of heaven and youth. 

 “What are you looking for, Paddy?” asked Dick. 

 “Say-gulls,” replied the prevaricator; then to himself: “Not a sight or a sound of them! Musha! musha! which way will I steer—north, south, aist, or west? It’s all wan, for if I steer to the aist, they may be in the west; and if I steer to the west, they may be in the aist; and I can’t steer to the west, for I’d be steering right in the wind’s eye. Aist it is; I’ll make a soldier’s wind of it, and thrust to chance.” 

 He set the sail and came aft with the sheet. Then he shifted the rudder, lit a pipe, leaned luxuriously back and gave the bellying sail to the gentle breeze. 

 It was part of his profession, part of his nature, that, steering, maybe, straight towards death by starvation and thirst, he was as unconcerned as if he were taking the children for a summer’s sail. His imagination dealt little with the future; almost entirely influenced by his immediate surroundings, it could conjure up no fears from the scene now before it. The children were the same. 

 Never was there a happier starting, more joy in a little boat. During breakfast the seaman had given his charges to understand that if Dick did not meet his father and Emmeline her uncle in a “while or two,” it was because he had gone on board a ship, and he’d be along presently. The terror of their position was as deeply veiled from them as eternity is veiled from you or me. 

 The Pacific was still bound by one of those glacial calms that can only occur when the sea has been free from storms for a vast extent of its surface, for a hurricane down by the Horn will send its swell and disturbance beyond the Marquesas. De Bois in his table of amplitudes points out that more than half the sea disturbances at any given space are caused, not by the wind, but by storms at a great distance. 

 But the sleep of the Pacific is only apparent. This placid lake, over which the dinghy was pursuing the running ripple, was heaving to an imperceptible swell and breaking on the shores of the Low Archipelago, and the Marquesas in foam and thunder. 

 Emmeline’s rag-doll was 

 Prev. P 26/164 next